M\,r. 


tihvary  of  Che  Cheolocjical  ^tmm<xxy 

PRINCETON    .    NEW  JERSEY 

'Hi  v»x* 

PRESENTED  BY 

The  Estate  of 
The  Rev.  John  B.  Weidinger 

BV  4501  .S63  1911 

Speer,  Robert  E.  1867-1947. 

A  Christian's  habits 


A  CHRISTIAN'S  HABITS 


^  Cfjrigtian's!  Ilabitsi 


ROBERT  E.   SPEER 


»& 


PH I L AD  ELPH I  A 

1911 


Copyright,  191  i,  by 

The  Trustees  of  the  Presbyterian  Board  of 
Publication  and  Sabbath-School  Work 


Published  April,  191 1 


PHILADELPHIA,  WITHERSPOON   BUILDING 

New  York  Chicago  San  Francisco 

St.  Louis  Nashville 


i\ 


W-: 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface    7 

The  Place  of  Habit    9 

The  Habit  of  Prayer   15  '' 

The  Habit  of  Duty.     I    23 

The  Habit  of  Duty.     II    29 

The  Habit  of  Duty.     Ill    35 

The  Habit  of  Good  Thinking 42 

The  Habit  of  Wise  Spending  50 

The  Habit  of  Hopefulness    61  *' 

The  Habit  of  Doing  Things   Now   70 

The  Habit  of  High-Mindedness    "jj 

The  Habit  of  HiGH-MiNDED   Lowliness    85 

The  Habit  of  Not  Dawdling    •.  92 

The  Habit  of  Decision    98 

The  Habit  of  Finding  the  Will  of  God 107 


r, 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


PREFACE 

"A  ND  he  entered  as  his  custom  was, 
/^  into  the  synagogue  on  the  sabbath 
day." 

"And  as  he  was  wont,  he  taught  them." 

"And  went,  as  his  custom  was,  unto  the 
iTfount  of  OHves." 

"The  Father  .  .  .  hath  not  left  me  alone; 
for  I  do  always  the  things  that  are  pleasing 
to  him." 

These  were  some  of  the  habits  of  the 
Lord.  He  had  habits,  as  each  man  must 
have,  as  God  himself  has;  for  do  we  not 
read  of  "the  ways  of  the  Lord"?  Is  this 
not  ever  the  earnest  man's  prayer,  "Show 
me  thy  ways,  O  Lord,  teach  me  thy  paths"  ? 
Indeed,  it  was  to  be  the  blessing  of  the  lat- 
ter days  that  they  w^ould  fulfill  this  prayer. 
"And  many  nations  shall  go  and  say,  Come 
ye,  and  let  us  go  up  to  the  mountain  of  Jeho- 
vah, and  to  the  house  of  the  God  of  Jacob; 
and  he  will  teach  us  of  his  ways,  and  we  will 
walk  in  his  paths." 

This  little  book  is  an  effort  to  discover 
and  describe  some  of  these  paths  of  God 
which  are  to  be  the  habits  of  his  children. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


L 


THE  PLACE  OF  HABIT 

IFE  is  a  school  of  habit.     There  is  a 

real  sense  in  which  our  business  here 

is   simply    the   acquisition   of   habits. 

We  start  with  certain   inherited  tendencies 

and  capabilities  and  these  certainly  do  affect 

our  choices,  and  the  choices  grow  into  our 

habits;    but  whatever  the  bias  for  good  or 

evil  with  which  we  start,  we  are  not  bound 

by  it.     How  often  we  see  a  good  ancestry 

shamed  in  some  bad  son,  and  a  bad  ancestry 

exalted  by  some  good  son !     Whatever  the 

bias  with  which  we  are  born,  and  the  pres- 

1 1         sure  of  our  surroundings  upon  us,  and  how- 

'         ever  much  excuse  is  to  be  found  in  these  for 

the  wreck  of  some  lives,  it  is  still  true  that 

we  order  our  own  ways  and  that  we  order 

■  i         them    by    the    character    of    the    habits    we 

>         choose  to  acquire. 

We  begin  our  work  in  this  school  when 
I  we  begin  to  live.  At  once  upon  beginning 
i  to  live  we  begin  to  act,  and  each  act  makes 
its  repetition  easier,  so  that  we  are  more 
likely  to  duplicate  that  act  than  to  perform 
a  new  one.  No  one  needs  to  teach  us  to 
form  habits.     We  do  it  by  reason  of  our 


10  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


nature,  of  which,  as  Carlyle  said :  "Habit 
is  the  deepest  law.  It  is  our  supreme 
strength,  if  also  in  certain  circumstances,  our 
most  miserable  weakness.  Let  me  go  once 
scanning  my  way  with  any  earnestness  of 
outlook,  and  successfully  arriving,  my  foot- 
steps are  an  invitation  to  me  a  second  time 
to  go  by  the  same  way.  It  is  easier  than 
any  other  way.  Habit  is  our  perennial  law 
— habit  and  imitation — there  is  nothing  more 
perennial  in  us  than  these  two.  They  are 
the  source  of  all  working  and  all  apprentice- 
ship, of  all  practice  and  all  learning  in  the 
world." 

The  law  of  habit  is  not  a  dead  mechani- 
cal law.  It  is  simply  the  government  of 
God  applying  to  all  life,  giving  stability  and 
order  and  firm  principle  to  it.  It  is  the  as- 
surance that  we  can  keep  the  results  of  our 
efforts  and  experience,  that  there  is  an  end 
toward  which  we  can  move  and  that  we  are 
not  to  be  left  alone  to  be  molded  by  nothing, 
or  to  be  molded  by  events  and  circumstances 
which  are  more  powerful  than  we.  "The 
truth  is,"  as  Edward  Bowen,  one  of  the  great 
English  schoolmasters  wrote  in  an  essay  on 
"The  Force  of  Habit,"  "the  truth  is  not 
that  events  mold  us,  but  that  we  mold  our- 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  11 


selves :  that  is.  if  with  reverence  it  may  be 
spoken,  the  Creator  supphes  the  instruments, 
and  we  have  the  work  to  do.  Whether  our 
work  be  a  cheerless,  solitary  task,  a  forlorn 
and  unaided  toil,  or  whether  in  no  single 
action  are  w^e  destitute  of  a  guidance  above 
ourselves,  Plato  did  not  doubt,  and  we  shall 
not:  but  that  it  is  in  this  way  that  we  shape 
our  being,  and  in  everything  work  toward  an 
end.  Scripture  and  reason  prove."  Habit  is 
God's  assent  to  the  finality  and  responsi- 
bility of  our  acts. 

If  it  were  not  for  habit,  we  should  never 
have  time  or  strength  for  any  advanced  liv- 
ing. "If  an  act  became  no  easier  after  being 
done  several  times,"  says  Dr.  Moudsley  in 
'The  Physiology  of  Mind,"  "if  the  careful 
direction  of  consciousness  were  necessary  to 
its  accomplishment  on  each  occasion,  it  is 
evident  that  the  whole  activity  of  a  lifetime 
might  be  confined  to  one  or  two  deeds — that 
no  progress  could  take  place  in  development. 
A  man  might  be  occupied  all  day  in  dressing 
and  undressing  himself;  the  attitude  of  his 
body  would  absorb  all  his  attention  and 
energy;  the  w^ashing  of  his  hands  or  the 
fastening  of  a  button  would  be  as  difficult 
to  him  on  each  occasion  as  to  the  child  on 


12  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


its  first  trial,  and  he  would  furthermore  be 
completely  exhausted  by  his  exertions." 
We  can  make  headway  upward  in  our  life 
struggle  because  each  step  is  secure.  We  do 
not  need  to  go  back  to  do  it  over  again  with 
the  same  efifort.  We  can  go  on  from  it  easily 
to  another  step  in  the  same  direction. 

Of  course,  the  law  of  habit,  like  every 
other  law,  is  like  a  two-edged  blade.  It 
cuts  both  ways.  The  good  that  we  have 
done  once,  we  can  do  more  easily  the  sec- 
ond time.  The  evil,  also,  that  we  have  done 
once  we  can  more  easily  repeat.  "I  know 
from  experience,''  says  John  Foster  in  his 
"Journal,"  ''that  habit  can,  in  direct  opposi- 
tion to  every  connection  of  the  mind  and  but 
little  aided  by  the  element  of  temptation 
(such  as  present  pleasures,  and  so  forth)  in- 
duce a  repetition  of  the  most  unworthy 
action.  The  mind  is  weak  where  it  has 
once  given  way.  It  is  long  before  a  prin- 
ciple restored  can  become  as  firm  as  one  that 
has  never  been  moved.  It  is  as  the  case  of 
a  mound  of  a  reservoir :  if  the  mound  has 
in  one  place  been  broken,  whatever  care  has 
been  taken  to  make  the  repaired  part  as  strong 
as  possible,  the  probability  is  that  if  it  gives 
way  again,  it  will  be  in  that  place."     The 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  13 


law  of  habit  is  meant  to  ])e  a  blessing-  to  us 
in  making  us  masters,  not  a  curse  in  making 
us  slaves. 

In  the  religious  life,  habit  is  meant  to 
play  a  great  and  blessed  part.  '*In  the  great 
majority  of  things,"  says  Foster,  "habit  is  a 
greater  plague  than  ever  afflicted  Egypt :  in 
religious  character  it  is  a  grand  felicity." 
By  it  we  are  set  free  from  many  conflicts 
which  we  had  to  wage  earnestly  at  first  but 
in  which  the  habit  of  victory  became  so  fixed 
that  we  are  no  longer  aware  of  those  conflicts. 
The  foes  whom  we  meet  are  still  with  us, 
but  we  give  them  no  more  thought  than  we 
give  to  the  earth  we  walk  on,  and  without 
which  we  could  not  stand  up  and  walk  for- 
ward. By  habit  also,  what  w^as  at  first  hard 
and  perplexing  has  become  natural  and 
simple.  Surrender  to  Christ  and  the  sub- 
ordination of  our  personal  ambition  to  him, 
once  difficult,  is  now  joyous.  The  lower 
has  been  subjugated  by  the  higher.  "When 
the  missionary  desire  came  in  and  took  full 
possession  of  my  heart,"  says  the  veteran 
missionary,  Griffith  John,  "the  lower  desire 
was  driven  out  and  driven  out  never  to  re- 
turn again.  That  was  a  great  victory,  one 
of  the   greatest   victories   ever   won   on   the 


14  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


arena  of  my  soul,  and  one  for  which  I  have 
never  ceased  to  feel  truly  thankful  to  God." 
And  the  virtues  and  activities  of  the  after 
life  are  sweet  to  us  in  their  full  sweetness, 
and  secure  and  trustworthy  only  when  they 
have  become,  as  they  may  become,  habitual. 
We  should  begin  to  acquire  these  habits 
at  once,  the  earlier  the  better.  If  we  do  not 
learn  to  love  God  in  our  earliest  years,  and 
to  trust  him  and  to  pray  to  him,  if  we  do 
not  become  familiar  with  the  Bible  now,  and 
now  acquire  a  love  for  purity  that  will  not 
look  upon  evil,  it  may  be  too  late  when  in 
after  years  we  turn  to  these  things  deciding 
to  make  them  then  habitual.  While  no  one 
need  ever  despair,  it  is  true,  as  Professor 
James  says,  that  habit  "dooms  us  all  to  fight 
out  the  battle  of  life  upon  the  lines  of  our 
nurture  or  our  early  choice,  and  to  make  the 
best  of  a  pursuit  that  disagrees,  because  there 
is  no  other  for  which  we  are  fitted,  and  it  is 
too  late  to  begin  again."  The  kind  of  Chris- 
tian we  want  some  day  to  be,  we  must  begin 
to  be  to-day. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  15 


THE  HABIT  OF  PRAYER 

THE  most  vital  of  all  the  habits  of  a 
Christian  is  the  habit  of  prayer. 
This  is  the  test  of  spiritual  reality 
and  strength.  The  man  whose  principles  and 
character  can  be  exposed  to  God,  who  loves 
to  go  to  God,  and  who,  though  aware  of  his 
weakness  and  sin,  ever  rejoices  to  be  searched 
through  by  the  light  of  God  in  the  fire  of 
his  presence,  cannot  be  false.  The  man  who 
does  not  seek  and  bear  this  testing  of  prayer, 
has  no  such  sense  of  his  own  sin,  of  the 
reality  of  God's  forgiveness  and  power  and 
of  the  nearness  of  his  presence  to  man,  as 
will  make  his  word  to  his  fellow-men  of 
deepest  effect.  "Without  much  solitary  com- 
munion with  Jesus,"  says  good  Dr.  Mac- 
laren  of  Manchester,  "effort  for  him  tends  to 
become  mechanical  and  to  lose  the  elevation 
of  motive  and  the  suppression  of  self  which 
give  it  all  its  power.  It  is  not  lost  time 
which  the  busiest  worker,  confronted  with 
the  most  imperative  calls  for  service,  gives 
to  still  fellowship  in  secret  with  God.  There 
can  never  be  too  much  activity  in  Christian 
work,  but  there  is  often  disproportioned  ac- 


16  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


tivity,  which  is  too  much  for  the  amount  of 
time  given  to  meditation  and  communion. 
This  is  one  reason  why  there  is  so  much 
sowing  and  so  httle  reaping  in  Christian 
work  to-day." 

It  is  just  as  important  that  praying  should 
become  a  habit  with  us,  as  breathing  or  eat- 
ing or  sleeping,  or  dressing  in  the  morning. 
If  these  things  did  not  become  habitual  with 
us,  life  would  soon  break  down  under  the 
burden  of  doing  them. 

But  they  are  all  made  natural  and  almost 
unconscious  to  us  by  practice,  so  that  we  do 
them  all  instinctively.  Prayer,  of  course,  can 
never  become  a  habit  which  needs  no  at- 
tention, for  prayer  is  the  fixing  of  the  at- 
tention upon  God;  but  it  can  become  per- 
fectly natural  for  us  to  do  this,  so  natural 
that  every  instant  our  hearts  will  turn  to 
God,  referring  all  things  to  him  and  seeking 
his  strength  and  peace. 

Those  who  are  not  in  the  habit  of  prayer 
at  all  times  are  not  likely  to  make  use  of 
prayer  even  in  special  times.  In  very  great 
crises,  of  course,  they  will  probably  do  so. 
Even  men  who  pay  no  heed  to  God  and  re- 
nounce prayer  are  likely,  in  the  time  of  mor- 
tal peril,  to  pray.    When  the  steamship  Spree 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  17 


broke  its  shaft  some  years  ago  while  cross- 
ing the  Atlantic,  with  Mr.  Moody  on  board, 
and  the  passengers  realized  their  danger, 
men  who  had  shown  no  interest  whatever  in 
religion  joined  the  group  around  Mr.  Moody 
who  prayed.  But  it  is  the  men  who  habitu- 
ally pray  who  know  how  to  pray  in  such 
emergencies.  If  we  learn  from  our  earliest 
childhood  to  pray  daily  and  hourly  there  will 
never  come  a  time  when  we  cannot  turn  to 
God  with  natural  friendship  and  assurance, 
and  tell  him  our  wants  and  desires. 

For  prayer  is  just  converse  with  God,  and 
all  conversation  requires  practice.  If  men 
do  not  talk  to  one  another,  they  lose  the  taste 
and  faculty  of  conversation,  and  so,  also,  if 
men  do  not  talk  with  God,  they  will  not 
acquire  the  love  and  power  of  prayer.  We 
can  make  constant  converse  with  God  the 
habit  of  our  lives.  We  are  more  likely  to 
do  this  if  we  think  of  God  as  Father,  as 
Jesus  encouraged  us  to  do.  If  we  think  of 
him  as  some  strange  and  distant  monarch, 
or  as  a  vague,  pervasive  spirit,  we  shall  feel 
no  disposition  to  speak  to  him  as  a  man 
would  speak  to  his  friend,  but  if  we  realize 
that  he  is  our  personal  Father,  and  our  in- 
separable Companion,  we  shall  naturally  turn 


18  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


to  him  to  share  our  pleasure  in  each  new 
joy  of  life,  our  delight  in  all  that  is  beautiful, 
to  thank  him  for  every  blessing,  to  seek  his 
guidance  in  every  perplexity,  and  his  com- 
fort and  help  in  every  sorrow  and  need. 

Such  a  habit,  as  Dr.  Maclaren  points  out, 
is  not  inconsistent  with  work  and  energy. 
It  is  the  best  stimulus  to  work,  and  the  great 
fountain  of  energy.  It  is  the  men  of  prayer, 
like  Chinese  Gordon  and  Stonewall  Jack- 
son who  were  the  great  soldiers.  As  Gordon 
wrote  to  his  sister : 

"I  believe  very  much  in  praying  for  others  ; 
it  takes  away  all  bitterness  toward  them. 
...  If  a  man  makes  an  arrangement  with 
his  fellow-man,  the  greatest  honor  to  him 
is  to  consider  that  arrangement  as  effectual 
and  final.  So  it  is  the  great  honor  to  our 
Lord  to  believe  his  word.  It  is  not  presump- 
tion to  claim  the  fulfillment  of  his  promises ; 
it  is  a  comforting  thought;  indeed,  it  is 
peace,  for  we  place  our  burden  on  him,  who 
is  both  willing  and  able  to  bear  it.  The 
prayers  of  the  patriarchs  were  most  simple; 
they  took  God  at  his  word,  that  is  all. 

"I  like  much  this  style  of  prayer,  and  rec- 
ommend it  to  you :  to  plead  with  Christ  to 
look  after  his  own  members.     He  knew  all 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  19 


about  those  members,  when  he  undertook  the 
covenant.  Surely,  if  he  bore  the  punishment 
of  our  sins,  as  he  did,  he  is  not  Hkely  to 
neglect  the  fruit  of  his  work.  Why,  the 
fact  of  his  not  doing  so  would  be  the  triumph 
of  his  foes,  and  would  be  virtual  failure ; 
and  we  know  that  he  could  not  fail.  I 
am  delighted  with  the  prayer;  I  only  realized 
it  latel}- — indeed  a  few  days  ago  ;  before  that 
it  was  misty.  I  now  ask  him  in  some  way 
to  regulate  matters  for  my  earthly  members, 
for  they  also  are  his.  I  really  believe  we 
shall  enter  the  resurrection  life  by  such 
prayers,  and  die  to  the  world." 

And  Jackson's  biographer  says  of  him : 
"He  prayed  without  ceasing,  under  fire 
as  in  the  camp;  but  he  never  mistook  his 
own  impulse  for  a  revelation  of  the  divine 
will.  He  prayed  for  help  to  do  his  duty, 
and  he  prayed  for  success.     He  knew  that 

More  things  are  wrought  by  prayer 
Than  this  world  dreams  of; 

but  he  knew,  also,  that  prayer  is  not  al- 
ways answered  in  the  way  which  man  would 
have  it.  .  .  .  Jackson's  religion  entered  into 
every  action  of  his  life.  No  dutv,  however 
trivial,  was  begun  without  asking  a  blessing, 


20  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


or  ended  without  returning  thanks.  He  had 
long  cultivated,  he  said,  the  habit  of  con- 
necting the  most  trivial  and  customary  acts 
of  life  with  a  silent  prayer." 

And  in  the  time  of  peace  as  well  as  in  war, 
the  man  of  prayer  is  the  man  of  action.  His 
prayer  is  work.  It  effects  things.  No  one 
felt  this  more  than  General  Samuel  Chap- 
man Armstrong,  the  founder  of  Hampton. 
"Prayer,"  said  he,  "is  the  greatest  thing  in 
the  world.  It  keeps  us  near  to  God — my 
own  prayer  has  been  most  weak,  wavering, 
inconstant,  yet  has  been  the  best  thing  I 
have  ever  done.  I  think  this  is  universal 
truth — what  comfort  is  there  in  any  but 
the  broadest  truth?" 

The  earlier  we  can  acquire  the  best  habits, 
the  better.  As  soon  as  children  can  talk, 
and  even  before,  it  is  time  to  begin  with 
them.  But  whether  or  not  the  habit  was 
begun  with  us  then,  we  have  something  to 
do  ourselves,  now,  in  strengthening  it.  We 
must  have  our  set  time,  morning  and  even- 
ing, by  grace  at  meals,  by  united  prayer  with 
others  for  the  settlement  and  confirmation 
of  our  habit.  And  we  need  to  associate  the 
thought  of  prayer  and  to  cultivate  its  prac- 
tice with  all  the  various  experiences  of  life. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  21 


The  time  tliat  we  so  often  cannot  spend  in 
any  other  work  can  be  profital^ly  spent  in 
]:)rayer — the  hours  while  awake  at  night,  and 
tiie  moments  during-  the  day  when  often  we 
can  only  sit  still  and  pray.  Maurice's  wife 
said  that  she  never  knew  her  husband  to 
wake  up  at  night  without  praying. 

The  habit  of  prayer  will  be  strengthened 
with  all  of  us  who  will  remember  to  pray 
after  as  well  as  before  the  events  and  ex- 
periences of  life.  Often  we  need  to  pray  even 
more  after  some  victory  than  before.  We 
shall  probably  remember  to  pray  after  our 
defeat.  Our  humiliation  and  sense  of  need 
will  drive  us  to  God  in  shame  of  weakness 
and  desire  for  strength.  But  when  we  suc- 
ceed we  often  forget  God,  and  are  content 
with  what  we  think  we  have  power  in  our- 
selves to  do.  In  truth,  we  have  no  power 
in  ourselves  to  do  what  we  ought.  All  our 
power  is  of  God,  and  it  is  suicidal  to  cut 
ourselves  ofif  from  him — the  one  Source  of 
life  and  righteousness  and  power. 

No  habit  of  Jesus'  life  is  more  evident 
than  his  habit  of  prayer.  It  must  have  been 
begun  in  his  earliest  boyhood.  It  was  the 
great  comfort  and  strength  of  his  life.  We 
may  not  be  able  to  make  it  mean  to  us  what 


22  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


it  meant  to  him,  but  without  it  we  shall  never 
find  what  he  came  to  give — the  life  of  strong, 
steadfast  duty-doing,  of  love  and  peace  and 
joy.  Let  us  set  about  acquiring  it  now,  and 
practice  it  every  day  and  every  hour. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  23 


THE  HABIT  OF  DUTY.     1 

ONE  of  the  most  wonderful  things  in 
the  life  of  our  Lord  was  his  habit 
of  duty.  How  large  a  part  it  played 
with  him  is  concealed  from  us  because  the 
word  is  so  seldom  used  in  our  English  trans- 
lation of  the  Gospels.  The  English  word 
"duty"  occurs  only  five  times  in  the  King 
James  Version,  and  but  once  in  the  Gospels 
in  the  words  of  Jesus.  "Even  so  ye  also, 
when  ye  shall  have  done  all  the  things  that 
are  commanded  you,  say.  We  are  unprofit- 
able servants;  we  have  done  that  which  it 
was  our  duty  to  do."  But  the  absence  of 
the  term  does  not  indicate  the  absence  of 
the  idea.  Again  and  again  the  thought  of 
duty  is  expressed  by  Christ  when  he  says, 
"I  must."  That  is  not  a  verbal  mood,  but 
a  separate  word  which  might  as  appropri- 
ately be  translated,  "It  is  my  duty."  "It 
is  my  duty  to  be  in  my  Father's  house,"  was 
the  first  expression  of  the  noble  conscious- 
ness which  was  to  dominate  his  career. 
When  his  ministry  began  and  the  enthusi- 
astic people  of  Capernaum  would  have  kept 
him  for  their  local  prophet,  he  replied,  "It 


24  A    CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


is  my  duty  to  preach  the  good  tidings  of 
the  kingdom  of  God  to  the  other  cities  also : 
for  therefore  was  I  sent."  As  the  work  of 
his  pubHc  ministry  absorbed  him,  he  said 
solemnly,  "It  is  our  duty  to  work  the  works 
of  him  that  sent  me  while  it  is  day :  the 
night  Cometh,  when  no  man  can  work." 
The  great  missionary  duty  of  the  divine  love 
lay  especially  upon  his  heart  and  to  this  and 
the  sacrifice  by  which  it  was  to  be  ac- 
complished he  often  referred.  "Other  sheep 
I  have,  which  are  not  of  this  fold :  them  also 
it  is  my  duty  to  bring."  "It  is  the  duty  of 
the  Son  of  man  to  suffer  many  things,  and 
be  rejected  .  .  .  and  be  killed."  And  the  two 
great  ideas  are  combined  with  the  impli- 
cation of  the  Church's  duty  in  the  words  of 
the  Lord  after  his  resurrection.  "It  was 
Christ's  duty  to  suffer,  and  to  rise  again 
from  the  dead  the  third  day;  and  [it  is  your 
duty  to  see]  that  repentance  and  remission 
of  sins  should  be  preached  in  his  name  unto 
all  the  nations."  From  the  first  to  the  last 
a  lofty  sense  of  duty  sustained  the  Son  of 
God. 

The  life  of  Paul  was  dominated  by  the 
same  principle  of  duty.  It  was  so  in  his  anti- 
Christian    earnestness:      "I    verily    thought 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  25 


with  myself  that  it  was  my  duty  to  do  many 
things  contrary  to  the  name  of  Jesus  of 
Nazareth."  Nothing  turned  him  aside  from 
what  he  believed  to  be  the  path  of  duty. 
His  conscience  was  serene  on  this  point.  He 
was  ready  to  admit  afterwards  that  his  moral 
judgment  had  been  terribly  wrong  in  those 
days,  and  when  he  afterwards  discovered 
how  wrong  it  had  been,  he  made  every  re- 
paration in  his  power,  but  he  never  regret- 
ted having  made  duty  supreme.  And  as  a 
persecutor,  so  as  a  missionary  he  bent  his 
life  with  absolute  devotion  under  his  con- 
viction of  duty.  "What  do  ye,  weeping  and 
breaking  my  heart?"  he  remonstrated  with 
his  friends  in  the  house  of  Philip  the 
Evangelist,  in  C?esarea,  as  they  sought  to 
dissuade  him  from  the  path  of  duty.  "I 
am  ready  not  to  be  bound  only,  but  also 
to  die."  With  him  it  was  anything  for  duty. 
It  must  be  so  with  us.  A  rigid  sense  of 
duty  is  the  noblest  thing  in  life.  It  is  nobler 
than  love.  For  in  its  lower  ranges  love 
is  tinged  with  selfishness,  and  when  it  rises 
above  these  ranges  and  is  pure,  untainted  by 
any  requirements  of  return,  it  melts  into 
duty  and  becomes  and  remains  the  loftier 
love  by  virtue  of  the  preservative  purity  of 


26  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


duty.  Only  duty  can  put  eternity  into  love 
and  lift  it  above  all  the  vicissitudes  and  dis- 
appointments and  betrayals  of  time.  And, 
in  fact,  the  Bible  always  grounds  love  upon 
duty.  In  it  as  in  God,  right  is  the  supreme 
thing.  God  is  love  because  he  is  right.  And 
we  are  bidden  to  love  because  we  ought. 
Duty  and  not  affinity  is  the  lofty  motive  of 
the  soul.  This  was  our  Lord's  teaching. 
"If  ye  love  me,  ye  will  keep  my  command- 
ments." But  what  is  it  to  love  him?  "Ye 
are  my  friends,  if  ye  do  the  things  which 
I  command  you."  And  the  supreme  duty 
he  laid  upon  his  disciples,  the  commandment 
he  called  "new"  was  the  duty  of  love.  "And 
this  is  his  commandment,"  says  John,  "that 
we  should  .  .  .  love  one  another.  ...  If 
God  so  loved  us,  it  is  our  duty  to  love  one 
another."  Love  is  not  a  mood  or  a  caprice. 
It  is  a  duty.  It  gets  its  greatness  and  its 
sovereignty  from  the  soul  of  duty  which  is 
in  it.  There  are  sensitive  souls  which  have 
tortured  themselves  because  they  could  not 
serve  from  a  sense  of  buoyant  and  joyous 
love.  Christ  does  not  ask  it.  He  asks  us 
to  do  our  duty  in  the  strength  of  God.  We 
do  not  need  to  want  to  tell  the  truth,  or  to 
be  unselfish,  or  to  go  as  foreign  missionaries. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  27 


It  is  good  if  we  do  feel  a  spontaneous  joy 
in  duty.  But  that  is  secondary.  The  duty  is 
the  supreme  thing  and  the  doing  of  it  will 
produce  the  right  feelings  in  time.  If  it 
does  not,  it  is  of  little  consequence,  if  only 
we  ha\'e  done  steadily  and  honestly  what  it 
was  our  duty  to  do.  For  this,  as  it  is  the 
noblest  element  and  the  highest  motive,  is 
also  the  one  adequate  rule  of  life,  "What 
is  right?"  "What  ought  I?"  This  and 
not  temperament  or  taste,  which  may  or 
may  not  be  what  they  should,  is  the  complete 
law  of  life  and  action  and  being. 

Obedience  to  the  law  of  duty  is  the  only 
way  to  clear  up  all  our  intellectual  confusion 
and  perplexities.  "Most  true  is  it,"  says 
Carlyle  in  a  familiar  quotation,  "as  a  wise 
man  teaches  us  'that  doubt  of  any  sort  can- 
not be  removed  except  by  action.'  On  which 
ground,  too,  let  him  who  gropes  painfully 
in  darkness  or  uncertain  light,  and  prays 
vehemently  that  the  dawn  may  ripen  into 
day,  lay  this  other  precept  well  to  heart, 
which  to  us  was  of  invaluable  service.  'Do 
the  duty  that  lies  nearest  thee,'  which  thou 
knowest  to  be  a  duty.  Thy  second  duty  will 
already  have  become  clearer."  This  is  cer- 
tainly a  law  throughout  life.     If  I  have  doubt 


28  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


as  to  my  ability  to  learn  to  swim,  I  can  never 
resolve  the  doubt  by  standing  on  the  bank 
and  arguing  about  it.  It  can  only  be  cleared 
away  by  my  going  into  the  water  and  mak- 
ing the  effort.  And  so  in  higher  things. 
I  can  never  settle  the  question  of  the  ex- 
istence of  God  or  the  truth  of  Christianity, 
by  speculation.  Even  if  I  am  satisfied  that 
the  results  of  my  speculation  prove  the  ex- 
istence of  God  and  the  truth  of  Christianity, 
both  God  and  Christianity  will  still  be  un- 
realities to  me  without  action.  I  must  ven- 
ture out  upon  God.  I  must  put  Christianity 
to  the  test  of  life.  I  must  do  my  duty.  And 
if  I  do  my  duty,  even  if  my  speculations  may 
have  baffled  me,  I  shall  issue  forth  at  last. 
Whoever  will  do  right  for  right's  sake  and 
follow  this  as  a  consuming  principle  will 
come  throusfh  to  God  who  is  the  Right. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  29 


THE  HABIT  OF  DUTY.     11 

DONE  steadily,  as  the  law  of  life,  duty 
prepares  men  for  whatever  tests  life 
may  bring.  These  tests,  which  are 
God's  examinations  of  the  soul,  come  with- 
out forewarning,  and  we  may  say  reverently 
that  there  is  no  cramming  for  these  ex- 
aminations of  God.  "The  man's  whole  life 
preludes  the  single  deed."  We  do  in  the 
crisis  what  the  hidden  principles  of  our 
career  have  foredoomed.  There  are  doubt- 
less exceptions,  some  real,  some  apparent, 
where  a  profligate  life  has  flowered  in  a  glori- 
ous self-sacrifice.  But  shirking  duty  in  the 
common  is  no  preparation  for  its  perform- 
ance in  the  exceptional,  and  the  man  who 
meets  his  crisis  when  it  comes  is  the  man 
who  made  it  sure  he  would  meet  it  by  the 
solid  steadiness  of  his  common  duty-seeking 
and  duty-doing.  This  is  the  path  to  power 
and  to  whatever  greatness  God  has  in  mind 
for  us.  The  writer  of  some  dialect  reminis- 
cences of  Abraham  Lincoln  draws  out  this 
lesson  from  the  early  crisis  in  that  great,  plain 
man's  life : 

"I  hadn't  been  watchin'  him  sweatin'  his 


30  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


brains  on  that  question  (of  slavery)  for  four 
years  without  knowin'.  I  tell  you  nobody 
that  didn't  see  him  often  them  days,  and 
didn't  care  enous^h  about  him  to  feel  bad 
when  he  felt  bad,  can  ever  understand  what 
Abraham  Lincoln  went  through  before  his 
debates  with  Douglas.  He  worked  his  head 
day  and  night  tryin'  to  get  that  slavery  ques- 
tion figured  out  so  nobody  could  stump  him. 
Greatest  man  to  think  things  out  so  nobody 
could  git  around  him  I  ever  see.  Hadn't 
any  patience  with  what  wa'n't  clear.  What 
worried  him  most,  I  can  see  now,  was  makin" 
the  rest  of  us  understand  it  like  he  did. 
...  I'd  figured  out  by  that  time  that  Lincoln 
was  a  big  man,  a  bigger  man  than  Stephen 
A.  Douglas.  Didn't  seem  possible  to  me  it 
could  be  so,  but  the  more  I  went  over  it 
in  my  mind  the  more  certain  I  felt  about 
it.  Yes,  sir,  Ld  figured  it  out  at  last  w^hat 
bein'  big  was,  that  it  was  bein'  right,  thinkin' 
things  out  straight  and  then  hangin'  on  to 
'em  because  they  was  right.  That  was  bein' 
big,  and  that  was  Abraham  Lincoln  all 
through — the  whole  of  him." 

Doing  duty  in  the  small  is  the  road  of 
a  man  to  character.  Fret  and  tempest  die 
out  in  the  life  which  is  solidified  and  calmed 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  31 


by  duty.  Consequences  may  be  what  they 
will — of  what  consequence  is  it?  Our  course 
has  been  set  for  us,  our  star  has  been  given 
us  to  steer  by.  The  unseen  Captain  knows 
the  rest. 

"The  more  we  see  of  life,"  wrote  Chinese 
Gordon  from  Shanghai  to  his  sister  in  1880, 
"'the  more  one  feels  disposed  to  despise  one's 
self  and  human  nature,  and  the  more  one 
feels  the  necessity  of  steering  by  the  Pole 
Star,  in  order  to  keep  from  shipwrecks;  in 
a  word,  live  to  God  alone.  If  he  smiles  on 
you,  neither  the  smile  nor  frown  of  man  can 
affect  you.  Thank  God,  I  feel  myself,  in  a 
great  measure,  dead  to  the  world  and  its 
honors,  glories  and  riches.  Sometimes  I 
feel  this  is  selfish ;  well,  it  may  be  so,  I  claim 
no  infallibility,  but  it  helps  me  on  my  way. 
Keep  your  eye  on  the  Pole  Star,  guide  your 
bark  of  life  by  that,  look  not  to  see  how 
others  are  steering,  enough  it  is  for  you 
to  be  in  the  right  way." 

Peace  and  good  conscience  come  from  the 
unity  of  the  life  with  duty,  with  the  con- 
ception of  life  as  duty,  the  vocation  of  God. 
It  is  nowhere  more  nobly  put  than  in  the 
closing  paragraph  of  Trench's  "Study  of 
Words,"  on  "vocation"  : 


32  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


"What  a  calming,  elevating,  ennobling 
view  of  the  tasks  appointed  us  in  this  world, 
this  word  gives!  We  did  not  come  to  our 
work  by  accident ;  we  did  not  choose  it  for 
ourselves;  but,  in  the  midst  of  much  that 
may  wear  the  appearance  of  accident  and 
self -choosing,  came  to  it,  by  God's  leading 
and  appointment.  How  will  this  consider- 
ation help  us  to  appreciate  justly  the  dignity 
of  our  work,  though  it  were  far  humbler 
work,  even  in  the  eyes  of  men,  than  that  of 
any  one  of  us  here  present!  What  an  as- 
sistance in  calming  unsettled  thoughts  and 
desires,  such  as  would  make  us  wish  to  be 
something  else  than  that  which  we  are! 
What  a  source  of  confidence,  when  we  are 
tempted  to  lose  heart,  and  to  doubt  whether 
we  shall  carry  through  our  work  with  any 
blessing  or  profit  to  ourselves  or  to  others ! 
It  is  our  'vocation,'  not  our  choosing,  but 
our  'calling' ;  and  he  who  called  us  to  it, 
will,  if  only  we  will  ask  him,  fit  us  for  it, 
and  strengthen  us  in  it." 

And,  to  speak  of  but  one  other  thing,  it 
is  the  law  of  duty  which  gives  beauty  to  life. 
Sometimes  we  doubt.  Duty  seems  harsh  and 
domineering  and  gray.  But  it  is  only  seem- 
in  e. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  33 


I  slept,  and  dreamed  that  life  was  Beauty; 
I  woke,  and  found  that  life  was  Duty. 
Was  thy  dream  then  a  shadowy  lie? 
Toil  on,  poor  heart,  unceasingly ; 
And  thou  shalt  find  thy  dream  to  be 
A  truth  and  noonday  light  to  thee. 

It  will  be  so  because  beauty  is  to  be  found 
in  tliat  which  duty  is,  order,  fixed  principle, 
obedience  to  law. 

All  these  results  of  duty-seeing  and  duty- 
doing  are  illustrated  in  the  lives  of  the  men 
who  have  been  known  as  men  of  duty. 
They  were  seen  in  Henry  Lawrence,  whose 
classic  epitaph  has  nerved  multitudes  to  fol- 
low the  way  he  went :  "Here  lies  Henry 
Lawrence  who  tried  to  do  his  duty."  They 
were  seen  in  Chinese  Gordon,  whose  last 
letter  to  his  sister  sent  from  Khartum  ends : 
"P.  S.  I  am  quite  happy,  thank  God,  and, 
like  Lawrence,  I  have  'tried  to  do  my  duty.'  " 
They  were  seen  in  the  Duke  of  Wellington, 
of  whom  one  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson's 
favorite  quotations  said,  "He  did  his  duty 
as  naturally  as  a  horse  eats  oats." 

Soldiers  are  not  the  only  men  who  have 
illustrated  the  iron  supremacy  of  duty.  Mis- 
sionaries have  been  even  nobler  representa- 
tives because  all  their  obedience  to  duty  was 
personal  and  moral.     Human  love,  comfort 


34  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS/ 


and  ambition  have  whispered  to  them  .n 
vain  to  turn  back.  Often  deep  disgust  at 
the  life  in  contact  with  which  they  had  to 
hve  and  racial  antipathy  too  deep  for  any 
overcoming  except  the  overcoming-  of  duty, 
have  protested,  and  perils  like  the  soldier's 
perils  have  threatened— all  in  vain  against 
duty.  Nearer  home  the  trained  nurse  is 
every  day  enduring  and  subduing  what  it  is 
not  the  mood  of  sympathy  or  any  impulse 
which  enables  her  to  meet,  but  duty  only. 
I  know  of  one  who  was  called  just  after  a 
serious  illness  of  her  own  to  what  she  sup- 
posed was  some  ordinary  case  of  need,  only 
to  find  that  it  was  a  poor  home  where  three 
children  were  sick  with  scarlet  fever  and 
diphtheria.  There  were  no  servants.  The 
mother  had  one  of  the  children  with  her  in 
the  kitchen.  The  home  was  unclean.  The 
bed  given  her  was  the  bed  in  which  one  of 
the  children  had  died  and  the  bed  clothing- 
had  not  been  changed.  She  stayed  and 
nursed  the  family.  Why?  For  love's  sake? 
Her  soul  revolted  from  the  experience  she 
was  passing  through.  She  stayed  for  duty 
and  duty  upheld  her. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  35 


THE  HABIT  OF  DUTY.     HI 

A  RECENT  newspaper  article  detailing 
the  enormous  sacrifice  of  life  in  the 
industrial  progress  of  Pittsburg  bore 
the  gruesome  title,  "Riches  Soaked  in 
Blood."  In  the  first  five  months  of  1907 
the  coroner  recorded  one  thousand  and 
ninety-five  deaths,  of  which  three  hundred 
and  forty-four  came  suddenly  and  violently 
in  the  mills  and  railroads  of  the  city.  One 
life,  it  was  declared,  was  sacrificed  for  every 
fifty  thousand  tons  of  coal  shipped,  one  life 
for  every  seven  thousand  tons  of  iron  and 
steel.  Why  were  these  men  where  death 
met  them  prematurely  ?  They  were  working 
for  the  support  of  their  families  or  were 
simply  busy  with  the  necessary  work  of  the 
world,  and  they  died  where  duty  placed  them 
and  doing  what  they  thought  they  must. 
Somewhere  along  the  line  of  the  production 
of  every  fragment  of  the  world's  wealth  is 
the  blood  of  a  man  who  fell  in  his  duty  with 
no  cry  to  the  world  for  its  praise,  but  taking 
what  came  with  his  duty  as  a  matter  of 
course. 

How  did  duty  get  the  power  to  dominate 


36  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


men  in  this  way,  and  what  enables  it  to  assert 
its  power  against  home  and  Hfe?  Because  it 
is  the  call  of  right,  and  what  right  bids  us 
to  do  it  is  wrong  not  to  do.  And  right  draws 
its  vital  authority  from  God.  God  is  the 
great  personal,  living  Right,  and  duty  is 
simply  his  voice.  That  is  the  lofty  meta- 
phor of  one  of  our  greatest  odes.  Let  each 
reader  turn  to  his  Wordsworth,  and  read 
all  of  the  ode  of  which  these  lines  are  a 
part : 

Stern  Daughter  of  the  Voice  of  God ! 

O  Duty !  if  that  name  thou  love 
Who  art  a  Hght  to  guide,  a  rod 

To  check  the  erring,  and  reprove ; 
Thou,  who  art  victory  and  law 
When  empty  terrors  overawe ; 
From  vain  temptations  dost  set  free ; 
And  calm'st  the  weary  strife  of  frail  humanity! 

Through  no  disturbance  of  my  soul, 

Or  strong  compunction  in  me  wrought, 
I  supplicate  for  thy  control ; 

But  in  the  quietness  of  thought : 
Me  this  unchartered  freedom  tires ; 
I  feel  the  weight  of  chance  desires : 
My  hopes  no  more  must  change  their  name, 
I  long  for  a  repose  that  ever  is  the  same. 

Stern  Lawgiver !  yet  thou  dost  wear 
The  Godhead's  most  benignant  grace ; 

Nor  know  we  anything  so  fair 
As  is  the  smile  upon  thy  face: 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  37 


Flowers  laugh  before  time  on  their  beds 
And   fragrance  in  thy  footing  treads  ; 
Thou  dost  preserve  the  stars  from  wrong ; 
And    the    most    ancient    heavens,    through    thee, 
are  fresh  and  strong. 

Because  duty  is  the  right  thing,  the  will 
of  God  for  man,  it  is  sufficient.  For  its 
own  sake  alone,  it  asks  to  be  done.  Itself 
is  its  own  reward.  It  asks  no  other,  and 
there  is  surely  something  pitiful  about  our 
practice  in  these  days  of  rewarding  and 
decorating  men  for  doing  their  duty.  Why 
should  they  not?  Is  duty  something  it  is 
wonderful  to  find  a  man  doing,  so  wonderful 
that  he  should  get  extra  pay  for  it  or  be  given 
a  ribboned  medal?  Surely  Fielding's  words 
in  "Tom  Thumb  the  Great"  are  nobler: 

When  I'm  not  thank'd  at  all,   I'm  thank'd  enough ; 
I've  done  my  duty,  and  I've  done  no  more. 

It  is  simply  our  duty  to  do  our  duty.  It 
is  not  the  winning  of  a  supererogatory  merit 
with  either  God  or  man.  It  is  not  a  mat- 
ter of  reward.  And  it  is  not  a  matter  of 
comparison  with  other  men's  achievements. 
Mr.  Maydole,  the  hammer-maker,  was  an  ex- 
pert. "I  have  made  hammers,"  he  told  Doc- 
tor Gannett  once,  "for  twenty-eight  years." 


38  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


"Yon  ought  to  be  able  to  make  a  pretty  good 
hammer,  then,  by  this  time,"  was  the  reply. 
"No,  sir!"  came  the  emphatic  answer.  "I 
never  made  a  pretty  good  hammer — I  make 
the  best  hammer  in  the  United  States."  This 
was  high,  all  but  the  comparison.  Duty  is 
not  to  do  better  than  another  man,  but  to  do 
it  all  and  to  the  limit  on  one's  own  line,  for 
the  eye  of  God,  not  for  the  comparing  eye 
of  man.  But  we  live  now  in  a  competitive 
day.  In  school  and  university  and  life  the 
rewards  are  all  for  exceeding  other  men.  In- 
dustry is  organized  on  that  principle.  Our 
athletics  rest  on  competition  with  others  or 
with  the  record  of  others.  It  may  be  doubted 
whether  the  good  old  times  were  as  good 
as  our  own  times,  but  the  spirit  attributed 
to  them  ought  to  be  the  spirit  of  all  times. 

"O  good   old   man,   how   well   in   thee   appears 
The  constant  service  of  the  antique  world, 
When  service  sweat  for  duty,  not  for  meed ! 
Thou  art  not  for  the  fashion  of  these  times, 
When  none  will  sweat  but   for  promotion." 

This  high  view  of  duty  is  our  deep  need. 
There  is  a  place  for  all  true  sentiment,  for 
temperament  and  inclination,  but  the  place 
of  control  is  for  duty.  We  need  to  acquire 
the  habit  of  doing  the  next  thing  as  duty. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  39 


Duty  is  ever  with  us  and  calling  to  us.  It 
ought  to  be  done  by  us  simply  because  it  is 
our  duty  until  the  thought  of  evading  or 
shirking  duty  will  never  come  to  us  and  we 
do  instinctively  as  though  nothing  else  were 
possible  that  which  is  our  duty.  The  habit 
of  duty  should  become  so  fixed  with  us  that 
we  should  see  nothing  but  duty.  There  is 
a  story  of  an  archer  who  was  teaching  his 
art.  The  mark  was  a  bird  in  a  tree.  "What 
do  you  see?"  the  archer  asked  the  first  man 
who  came  forward  to  shoot.  "I  see  a  bird 
in  a  tree,"  said  he.  "Stand  aside,"  said  the 
archer.  "What  do  you  see?"  he  said  to  the 
second  man.  "I  see  a  bird,"  replied  he. 
''Stand  aside,"  the  archer  said.  "And  what 
do  you  see?"  he  asked  the  third.  "I  see  the 
head  of  a  bird,"  said  he.  "Shoot,"  the  archer 
cried.  We  should  be  blind  to  all  that  diverts 
or  obscures.  The  things  that  deaden  the 
sense  of  duty  must  have  no  place  with  us. 
The  "Stern  Daughter  of  the  Voice  of  God" 
will  endure  no  indulgences  which  stifle  her 
word  in  our  hearts. 

All  duty  can  be  done.  What  we  ought 
to  do  is  the  only  thing  we  can  do,  if  we  are 
what  we  ought  to  be.  No  right  is  impos- 
sible.    "Let  us  have  faith  that  right  makes 


40  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


might,"  said  Lincoln  in  his  speech  in  New 
York  in  1859,  "and  in  that  faith  let  us  dare 
to  do  our  duty."  It  can  be  done,  however 
impossible,  just  because  it  is  our  duty  to 
do  it.  We  must  believe  this  if  we  have  any 
ear  for  God  at  all,  for,  as  Emerson  wrote 
in  lines  inscribed  on  the  wall  of  the  school- 
room of  the  most  efficient  school  for  boys  in 
America : 

So  nigh  is  grandeur  to  our  dust, 

So  near  is  God  to  man, 
V/hen   Duty  whispers   low,   Thou   must. 

The  youth  replies,  I  can  ! 

"When  I  was  a  boy,"  said  a  man  recently 
speaking  to  boys,  "my  father  gave  me  a 
diary  on  Christmas  at  the  close  of  a  year 
in  which  I  made  changes  in  my  life  plans 
which  were  at  the  time  a  great  shock  and 
disappointment  to  him.  He  was  a  reticent 
man,  so  that  when  he  did  speak  we  heard. 
He  said  little  about  the  matter,  but  in  the 
diary  he  had  written  on  the  fly  leaf,  'March 
on  to  duty.'  If  it  led  away  from  his  desires, 
well  and  good,  it  was  duty  which  was  to 
be  followed  wheresoever  it  led."  A  new 
day  will  break  in  the  Church  and  the  world, 
in  college  and  home,  in  public  and  private  life 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  41 


when  men  "march  on  to  duty/'  unfrightened, 
unseduced,  obedient,  when  they  will  say  and 
live  by  their  word,  "It  is  my  duty  to  be 
about  my  Father's  business  and  to  finish  the 
work  which  he  gave  me  to  do."  Those  men 
will  vanquish  death  and  hell,  and,  after 
Christ,  will  build  the  walls  of  the  kingdom 
which  is  righteousness  and  duty. 


42  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


THE  HABIT  OF  GOOD  THINKING 

"  TT  E  was  an  essentially  pure-minded 
Jj[  man,"  said  Edward  Caird  of  his 
brother  John  Caird,  the  head  of  the 
University  of  Glasgow  and  one  of  the  great- 
est speakers  and  scholars  of  his  day.  "to 
whom  no  one  could  speak  of  anything  doubt- 
ful or  equivocal."  He  was  a  thinking  man 
and  he  thought  of  good  things,  and  his  good 
thinking  shaped  his  character  and  gave  him 
a  good  defense  against  all  that  was  un- 
worthy and  base.  Such  things  stayed  away 
from  the  man  whose  mind  was  always  busy 
and  always  clean. 

This  habit  of  good  thinking  is  one  of  the 
most  necessary  habits  to  acquire.  We  have 
to  think.  We  can  only  choose  what  we  will 
think  about  and  how  we  will  think,  whether 
carefully  and  consecutively  or  in  disorder 
and  at  random.  What  we  think  about  is  the 
first  thing.  "I  don't  know  what  to  do,"  said 
a  student  in  one  of  our  colleges.  "My  father 
is  one  of  the  best  of  men  and  my  grandfather 
was  a  noble  man  before  him,  and  yet  I  have 
such  bad  thoughts  in  my  mind.  I  am 
ashamed  of  them,  and  I  want  to  get  rid  of 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  43 


them."  There  is  good  hope  that  the  boy 
who  is  ashamed  of  bad  thoughts  can  get  rid 
of  them.  If  we  despise  them,  and  try  to 
make  it  uncomfortable  for  them,  they  will 
soon  go  away  of  their  own  accord.  And  we 
can  do  this  best,  not  by  dwelling  upon  the 
wrong  thoughts,  but  by  refusing  to  dwell 
upon  them,  by  turning  the  mind,  instead,  at 
once  to  good  things.  "Try  thinking  about 
Christ  whenever  a  bad  thought  comes,"  one 
friend  advised  another  as  they  sat  and  talked 
under  the  trees  on  a  hill  overlooking  a  river 
in  North  Carolina.  "Let  me  hear  how  the 
plan  works  after  you  have  tried  it.''  In  due 
time  he  had  the  simple  answer  :  "I  have  tried 
it.     It  works." 

Each  one  of  us  should  have  a  stock  of 
good  thoughts — of  places  where  we  have 
been,  of  great  games  we  have  seen  or  played 
in,  of  rivers  where  we  have  fished  or  forests 
we  have  hunted  in,  of  great  men  we  have 
seen,  of  books  we  have  read,  of  bits  of  poetry 
or  pictures  of  real  deeds  of  heroism,  or  of 
problems  of  life  or  politics.  These  we  should 
have  at  hand,  so  as  to  be  able  to  draw  on 
them  at  any  moment,  and  thus  never 
be  alone  with  only  wasteful  or  harmful 
thoughts.     And  each  time  we  have  to  make 


44  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


a  choice  between  the  thoughts  that  help  and 
those  that  harm,  we  need  only  say,  "Now 
which  thoughts  are  the  right  ones?"  and 
think  those  alone. 

But  some  say  that  it  is  hard  to  control 
thought.  It  is  at  first.  That  is  why  the 
law  of  habit  must  be  used  in  the  matter  of 
thoughts.  Character  will  show  itself  in  the 
firm  control  of  our  thoughts,  and  on  the 
other  hand,  the  firm  control  of  our  thoughts 
will  breed  solid  character.  We  can  see  this 
clearly  in  Mr.  Gladstone.  "Character,"  says 
Mr.  John  Morley  in  the  "Life  of  Gladstone," 
"as  has  often  been  repeated,  is  completely 
fashioned  will,  and  this  superlative  require- 
ment, so  indispensable  for  every  man  of 
action  in  whatever  walk  and  on  whatever 
scale,  was  eminently  Mr.  Gladstone's.  From 
force  of  will,  with  all  its  roots  in  habit,  ex- 
ample, conviction,  purpose,  sprang  his  lead- 
ing and  most  effective  qualities.  He  was 
never  very  ready  to  talk  about  himself,  but 
when  asked  what  he  regarded  as  his  master 
secret,  he  always  said,  'Concentration.' 
Slackness  of  mind,  vacuity  of  mind,  the 
wheels  of  the  mind  revolving  without  biting 
the  rails  of  the  subject,  were  insupportable. 
Such   habits  were   of   the    family   of   faint- 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  45 


heartedness,  which  he  abhorred.  Steady 
practice  of  instant,  fixed,  effectual  attention, 
was  the  key  ahke  to  his  rapidity  of  appre- 
hension and  to  his  powerful  memory.  In 
the  orator's  temperament,  exertion  is  often 
followed  by  a  reaction  that  looks  like  indo- 
lence. This  was  never  so  with  him.  By  in- 
stinct, by  nature,  by  constitution,  he  was  a 
man  of  action  in  all  the  highest  senses  of  a 
phrase  too  narrowly  applied  and  too  nar- 
rowly construed.  The  currents  of  daimonic 
energy  seemed  never  to  stop,  the  vivid  sus- 
ceptibility to  impressions  never  to  grow  dull. 
He  was  an  idealist,  yet  always  applying  ideals 
to  their  purposes  in  act.  Toil  was  his  native 
element ;  and  though  he  found  himself  pos- 
sessed of  many  inborn  gifts,  he  was  never 
visited  by  the  dream  so  fatal  to  many  a  well- 
laden  argosy,  that  genius  alone  does  all. 
There  was  nobody  like  him  when  it  came 
to  difficult  business,  for  bending  his  whole 
strength  to  it,  like  a  mighty  archer  string- 
ing a  stiff  bow."  We  do  not  have  the  sort 
of  mind  Mr.  Gladstone  had,  but  we  can  ap- 
ply his  principles  to  such  minds  as  we  have. 
And,  indeed,  it  is  not  great  and  original 
thoughts  which  need  to  constitute  the  stuff 
on  which  we  keep  our  minds  at  work.     What 


46  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


we  need  is  to  bring  our  common  experi- 
ences and  necessities  under  the  conscious 
dominance  of  simple  religious  convictions. 
We  shall  find  problems  enough  here  to  tax 
us  and  to  give  our  minds  all  the  occupation 
they  are  capable  of.  Even  so  great  a  man 
as  John  Caird  found  it  so.  "The  difficulty 
you  talk  of  is  a  most  real  one,"  he  wrote. 
"I  mean  that  of  bringing  principles  to  bear 
on  the  common  trials  and  petty  anxieties  of 
daily  life.  Theoretical  affliction  and  submis- 
sion in  a  book,  or  in  our  solemn  and  some- 
times formal  words  in  prayer,  are  very  dif- 
ferent things  from  that  homely,  rugged, 
hard-featured  thing  that  meets  us  in  the  face, 
when  we  come  down  from  the  clouds  to  the 
world  of  realities,  the  world  of  headaches 
and  heartaches,  of  coarse,  uncongenial  con- 
tacts and  intercourses.  But  this  is  our  trial, 
and  the  trial  which,  since  the  age  of  perse- 
cution is  passed  away,  is  perhaps  the  most 
common  and  the  most  difficult  to  which  a 
Christian  is  subjected.  I  know  no  hope  for 
it  but  perseverance  and  prayer.  It  is  the  old 
thought  of  great  principles  and  small  duties 
and  trials,  and  I  need  not  descant  upon  it  to 
you.  But  I  am  quite  convinced  that  Chris- 
tian advancement  consists  in  nothing  so  much 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  47 


as  a  habit,  acquired  by  long  effort  and  after 
many  struggles  and  failures,  of  bringing  high 
religious  motive  and  feeling  to  bear  on  the 
common  incidents  of  life.  Don't  you  envy 
that  state  of  mind  where  this  has  ceased  to 
be  a  work  of  effort  and  conscious  toil,  when 
duty  becomes  a  delight,  God's  presence  con- 
stantly realized  without  endeavor,  and  so 
his  service  perfect  freedom?"  This  is  what 
comes  to  those  who  do  bring  all  their 
thoughts  under  control  of  the  obedience  of 
Christ. 

We  can  help  ourselves  to  acquire  the  habit 
of  good  thinking  by  persisting  in  seeing  al- 
ways first  the  good  in  people  and  in  things. 
And  we  can  help  ourselves  to  seeing  the 
good  by  refusing  to  speak  of  the  evil  unless 
it  is  clearly  necessary  to  do  so.  We  do  not 
need  to  fall  into  the  moral  slovenliness  of 
the  lines  which  declare  that  there  is  so  much 
bad  in  the  best  of  us,  and  so  much  good  in 
the  worst  of  us,  that  it  scarcely  behooves  any 
of  us  to  speak  ill  of  the  rest  of  us.  There  is 
ill  which  needs  to  be  spoken  of  and  spoken 
against.  But  for  the  most  part  it  is  the 
good  which  needs  to  be  brought  out,  and 
we  can  easily  find  it  and  bring  it  out  if  we 
wMsh.      Acquiring   the    habit    of   doing   this 


48  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


will  react  upon  our  thoughts,  and  we  shall 
have  our  minds  filled  with  what  is  pure  and 
worthy  and  of  good  report. 

No  habit  can  give  more  pleasure  at  all 
times  than  the  habit  of  good  thinking.  When 
we  are  with  others  it  will  be  the  source  and 
ally  of  the  habit  of  unselfish  service,  and 
when  we  are  alone  and  have  no  opportunity 
to  serve  others,  we  can  be  glad  and  content 
alone  because  we  have  always  satisfying  re- 
sources with  us.  At  night,  when  we  lie 
awake,  we  are  not  unemployed.  Old  Dr. 
Samuel  T.  Spear  said  that  he  would  go  over 
in  his  mind,  as  he  lay  awake,  whole  books 
of  the  Bible.  And  those  whose  storehouse 
is  less  richly  supplied  than  his,  should  still 
have  enough  there  for  all  hours  of  solitude. 
The  treasure  of  good  thoughts  is  better  than 
all  other  wealth. 

We  can  begin  to  acquire  the  habit  of  good 
thinking  at  once  if  we  do  not  have  it  already. 
The  moment  we  lay  down  this  book  we 
can  begin  to  recall  the  lessons  we  learned 
from  it.  We  can  review  these  in  our  minds, 
talk  them  over  with  the  first  people  we  meet, 
and  begin  at  once  to  practice  them  In  our 
own  lives.  We  can  be  on  the  watch  and 
not  allow  any  vagrant  thoughts  to  creep  in 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  49 


and  lull  the  mind  into  indolence.  When  the 
evening  comes  we  can  read  some  good  book 
and  turn  it  over  in  our  thought  as  we  get 
ready  for  rest.  In  the  morning  when  we 
awake,  we  can  turn  our  minds  at  once  to 
the  last  thought  of  the  evening  before,  and 
then  to  the  principles  by  which  we  are  to 
live  the  new  day.  A  few  days  of  discipline 
like  this  will  set  our  minds  toward  good 
ways,  and  by  patient  continuance  in  good 
thoughts,  we  shall  soon  have  the  habit  of 
them  and  the  peace  and  strength  which  come 
with  a  mind  established  in  the  love  and 
practice  of  what  is  good  alone. 


50  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


THE   HABIT  OF  WISE  SPENDING 


I 


DON'T  see  why  it  is  wrong  to  gamble 
at  cards,"  said  a  student  in  one  of  our 
colleges.  "On  what  ground  is  it 
wrong?  I  do  not  lose  more  than  I  can  af- 
ford to  lose  and  I  like  the  excitement  which 
I  get  for  the  money."  "Well,"  said  his 
friend,  "I  think  I  see  several  reasons  why  it 
is  wrong,  but  it  seems  to  me  that  it  is  enough 
to  say  that  it  is  a  silly  way  to  spend  money. 
You  don't  really  get  anything  in  return  for 
it.  And  it  is  not  only  silly,  it  is  wickedly 
wasteful.  When  there  are  in  every  one  of 
our  cities,  agencies  for  the  care  of  destitute 
children  and  for  all  kinds  of  benevolent  and 
useful  service,  cramped  and  straitened  for 
funds,  when  you  remember  how  much  good 
money  can  do,  I  think  a  man  has  no  right 
to  waste  his  money  in  gambling."  We  have 
no  more  right  to  spend  wrongly  than  we  have 
to  acquire  wrongly. 

This  question  of  the  wise  spending  of  our 
money  is  fundamental.  It  is  a  question  of 
the  spending  of  our  life,  or  of  some  one's 
life.  For  money  is  life.  As  Dr.  Schauffler 
said  once  in  an  address : 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  51 


"Money  is  myself.  I  am  a  laboring  man, 
we  will  say,  and  can  handle  a  pickax,  and 
I  hire  myself  out  for  a  week  at  two  dollars 
a  day.  At  the  close  of  the  week  I  get  twelve 
dollars  and  I  put  it  in  my  pocket.  What  is 
that  twelve  dollars?  It  is  a  week's  worth  of 
my  muscle  put  into  greenbacks  and  pocketed ; 
that  is,  I  have  a  week's  worth  of  myself  in 
my  pocket. 

"Now,  the  moment  you  understand  this, 
you  begin  to  understand  that  money  in  your 
pocket  is  not  merely  silver  and  gold,  but  is 
something  human,  something  that  is  instinct 
with  power,  because  it  represents  power  ex- 
pended. ( If  you  are  not  earning  any  money 
of  your  own,  and  your  father  is  support- 
ing you,  then  you  are  carrying  that  much 
of  your  father  around  in  your  pocket.) 
Now  money  is  like  electricity;  it  is  stored 
power,  and  it  is  only  a  question  as  to  where 
that  power  is  to  be  loosed, 

"Do  you  see  what  a  blessed,  what  a  solemn 
thing  this  giving  is,  this  giving  of  my  stored 
self  to  my  Master?  Surely  we  need,  in  the 
matter  of  giving,  consecrated  thought  as  to 
where  to  loose  ourselves,  earnest  prayer  in 
the  guidance  of  the  choice  of  where  to  loose 
our  stored  power,  and  earnest  prayer  to  God 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


to  add  his  blessing  to  the  loosed  personality 
in  this  money  that  I  have  sent  abroad,  that 
there  may  come  a  tenfold  increase  because 
of  my  personal  power  that  I  have  sent." 
What  is  true  of  giving  is  true  of  all  spend- 
ing. We  have  no  right  to  be  reckless  of 
human  life,  and  yet  we  are  reckless  of  life 
when  we  spend  money  recklessly. 

The  question  of  saving  is  simply  the  ques- 
tion of  spending.  Industry  and  frugality  are 
the  simple  rules  of  prosperity.  'Tn  order  to 
secure  my  credit  and  character  as  a  trades- 
man," says  Benjamin  Franklin  in  his  shrewd 
autobiography,  'T  took  care  not  only  to  be 
in  reality  industrious  and  frugal,  but  to  avoid 
the  appearances  to  the  contrary."  On  these 
two  principles  he  constantly  lays  emphasis. 
Of  his  printing  business  in  Philadelphia  he 
writes : 

"My  circumstances,  however,  grew  daily 
easier.  My  original  habits  of  frugality  con- 
tinuing, and  my  father  having,  among  his 
instructions  to  me  when  a  boy,  frequently 
repeated  a  proverb  of  Solomon,  'Seest  thou 
a  man  diligent  in  his  business?  he  shall 
stand  before  kings;  he  shall  not  stand  be- 
fore mean  men,'  I  thence  considered  industry 
as  a  means  of  obtaining-  wealth  and  distinc- 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  53 


tion,  wliich  encouraged  me,  thoiigli  I  did 
not  think  that  I  should  ever  Hterally  stand 
before  kings,  which,  however,  has  since  hap- 
pened;  for  I  have  stood  before  five,  and  even 
liad  the  honor  of  sitting  down  with  one,  the 
King  of  Denmark,  to  chnner." 

The  fifth  and  sixth  among  the  virtues  he 
set  out  to   acquire  were : 

"Frugality — Make  no  expense  but  to 
do  good  to  others  or  yourself;  that  is,  waste 
nothing. 

"Industry — Lose  no  time  ;  be  always  em- 
ployed in  something  useful ;  cut  off  all  un- 
necessary actions." 

He  tells  us  of  his  "Poor  Richard's  Alma- 
nac" : 

"I  filled  all  the  little  spaces  that  occurred 
between  the  remarkable  days  in  the  calendar, 
with  proverbial  sentences,  chiefly  such  as 
inculcated  industry  and  frugality,  as  the 
means  of  procuring  wealth,  and  thereby  se- 
curing virtue;  it  being  more  difficult  for  a 
man  in  want  to  act  always  honestly,  as,  to 
use  here  one  of  those  proverbs,  'It  is  hard 
for  an  empty  sack  to  stand  upright.'  " 

To  be  rich  is  no  high  ambition,  but  each 
of  us  not  only  may,  but  ought  to  strive  to 
be  independent  and  to  provide  for  others  de- 


54  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


pendent  upon  ns.  And  the  way  to  do  this 
which  is  open  to  us  is  not  the  earning  of 
large  sums  of  money,  but  the  saving  of  small 
sums.  If  we  stop  the  leaks,  the  supply  will 
grow.  What  we  thus  save  is  not  our  treas- 
ure. That  is  to  be  laid  up  "where  neither 
moth  nor  rust  doth  consume,  and  where 
thieves  do  not  break  through  nor  steal."  If 
what  we  save  becomes  our  treasure  we  are 
doing  wrong.  But  we  are  not  doing  our 
duty  if  we  carelessly  let  all  that  comes  to  us 
slip  loosely  away  and  do  nothing  to  prepare 
for  our  future  needs  and  those  of  others. 
Nothing  in  Old  Testament  or  New  excuses 
any  of  us  from  the  duties  of  industry  and 
frugality. 

The  virtue  of  simplicity  in  spending  is 
rarer  now  than  it  was  in  an  earlier  day.  Then 
the  very  conditions  of  life  in  our  country 
forced  upon  the  people,  except  a  few,  a  much 
sterner  economy  and  more  frugal  manage- 
ment than  is  usual  now.  Families  then  prac- 
ticed both,  cultivated  an  energy  and  a  sim- 
plicity wl'ich  constituted  in  many  a  home  the 
finest  school  of  character  to  be  found,  and 
extracted  from  hard  conditions  a  comfort- 
able subsistence  to  the  old,  and  a  hard-bought 
education  to  the  young.     In  Mrs.  Cheney's 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  55 


life  of  her  father,  Horace  Bushnell,  there 
is  a  beautiful  picture  of  such  a  home,  and 
Horace  Bushnell  himself  has  described,  in 
a  noble  speech  on  "The  Age  of  Homespun,'' 
the  frugality  of  the  home : 

"It  was  also  a  great  point,  in  this  home- 
spun mode  of  life,  that  it  imparted  exactly 
what  many  speak  of  only  with  contempt, 
a  closely  girded  habit  of  economy.  Har- 
nessed, all  together,  into  the  producing  pro- 
cess, young  and  old,  male  and  female,  from 
the  boy  that  rode  the  plow  horse  to  the 
grandmother  knitting  under  her  spectacles, 
they  had  no  conception  of  squandering  lightly 
what  they  all  had  been  at  work,  thread  by 
thread,  and  grain  by  grain,  to  produce.  They 
knew  too  exactly  what  everything  cost,  even 
small  things,  not  to  husband  them  carefully. 
Men  of  patrimony  in  the  great  world,  there- 
fore, noticing  their  small  way  in  trade  or 
expenditure,  are  ready,  as  we  often  see,  to 
charge  them  with  meanness,  simply  because 
they  knew  things  only  in  the  small ;  or, 
what  is  not  far  different,  because  they  were 
too  simple  and  rustic  to  have  any  conception 
of  the  big  operations  by  which  other  men 
are  wont  to  get  their  money  without  earning 
it,  and  lavish  the  more  freely  because  it  was 


56  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


not  earned.  Still,  this  knowing  life  only  in 
the  small,  it  will  be  found,  is  really  anything 
but  meanness.'' 

Many  of  the  strongest  and  best  men  of 
our  country  came  from  such  homes  and  re- 
gret that  their  children  wnll  not  have  the 
strong  discipline  of  their  fathers. 

Occasionally  a  strong  man  who  did  not 
grow  up  in  such  a  homespun  home  has  never- 
theless a  character  of  exactness  and  sim- 
plicity and  the  will  and  wisdom  to  strive  to 
pass  it  on  to  his  children.  In  Mr.  Morley's 
"Life  of  Gladstone,"  a  letter  of  Mr.  Glad- 
stone's to  his  son  is  printed,  revealing  the 
man  who  wrote,  and  counseling  with  sound 
sense,  the  younger  man  who  was  in  college 
at  Oxford  at  the  time : 

"i.  To  keep  a  short  journal  of  principal 
employments  in  each  day;  most  valuable  as 
an  account  book  of  the  all-precious  gift  of 
Time. 

"2.  To  keep  also  an  account  book  of  re- 
ceipt and  expenditure ;  and  the  least  trouble- 
some way  of  keeping  it  is  to  keep  it  with 
care.  This  done  in  early  life,  and  carefully 
done,  creates  the  habit  of  performing  the 
great  duty  of  keeping  our  expenditure  (and 
therefore  our  desires)  within  our  means. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


"3.  Read  attentively  (and  it  is  pleasant 
reading)  Taylor's  Essay  on  Money,  which, 
if  I  have  not  done  it  already,  1  will  give  you. 
It  is  most  healthy  and  most  useful  reading. 

"4.  Establish  a  minimum  number  of  hours 
in  the  day  for  study,  say  seven  at  present, 
and  do  not,  without  reasonable  cause,  let  it 
be  less ;  noting  down  against  yourself  the 
days  of  exception.  There  should  also  be  a 
minimum  number  for  the  vacations,  which 
at  Oxford  are  extremely  long. 

"5.  There  arises  an  important  question 
about  Sundays.  Though  we  should  to  the 
best  of  our  power  avoid  secular  work  on 
Sundays,  it  does  not  follow  that  the  mind 
should  remain  idle.  There  is  an  immense 
field  of  knowledge  connected  with  religion, 
and  much  of  it  is  of  a  kind  that  will  be  of 
use  in  the  schools  and  in  relation  to  your 
general  studies.  In  these  days  of  shallow 
skepticism,  so  widely  spread,  it  is  more 
than  ever  to  be  desired  that  we  should 
be  able  to  give  a  reason  for  the  hope  that 
is  in  us. 

"6.  As  to  duties  directly  rehgious,  such 
as  daily  prayer  in  the  morning  and  evening, 
and  daily  reading  of  some  portion  of  the 
Holy  Scripture,  or  as  to  the  holy  ordinances 


58  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


of  the  gospel,  there  is  little  need,  I  am  con- 
fident, to  advise  you;  one  thing,  however. 
I  would  say,  that  it  is  not  difficult,  and  it 
is  most  beneficial,  to  cultivate  the  habit  of 
inwardly  turning  the  thoughts  to  God, 
though  but  for  a  moment  in  the  course,  or 
during  the  intervals  of  our  business ;  which 
continually  •  presents  occasions  requiring  his 
aid  and  guidance. 

"Turning  again  to  ordinary  duty,  I  know 
no  precept  more  wide  or  more  valuable  than 
this :  cultivate  self-help ;  do  not  seek  nor 
like  to  be  dependent  upon  others  for  what  you 
can  yourself  supply;  and  keep  down  as  much 
as  you  can  the  standard  of  your  wants,  for 
in  this  lies  a  great  secret  of  manliness,  true 
wealth,  and  happiness ;  as,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  multiplication  of  our  wants  makes  us 
effeminate  and  slavish,  as  well  as  selfish. 

"In  regard  to  money  as  well  as  to  time, 
there  is  a  great  advantage  in  its  methodical 
use.  Especially  is  it  wise  to  dedicate  a  cer- 
tain portion  of  our  means  to  purposes  of 
charity  and  religion,  and  this  is  more  easily 
begun  in  youth  than  in  after  life.  The  great- 
est advantage  of  making  a  little  fund  of  this 
kind  is  that  when  we  are  asked  to  give,  the 
competition  is  not  between  self  on  the  one 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  59 


hand  and  charity  on  the  other,  but  between 
the  different  purposes  of  rehgion  and  charity 
with  one  another,  among  which  we  ought  to 
make  the  most  careful  choice.  It  is  desirable 
that  the  fund  thus  devoted  should  not  be  less 
than  one  tenth  of  our  means ;  and  it  tends 
to  bring  a  blessing  on  the  rest." 

Such  care  and  frugality,  as  Bushnell  said, 
are  not  meanness.  They  are  simple  honesty. 
Some  people  think  that  all  spending  is  good 
because  it  promotes  business,  and  that  even 
extravagance  has  its  excuse  in  providing 
labor  for  those  who  minister  to  it.  But  there 
is  bad  and  wasteful  spending  as  well  as  good 
and  helpful  spending.  Money  that  is  at  work 
employing  men  at  useful  production  is  doing 
more  than  money  that  is  lavished  on  frills 
and  whims  whose  manufacture  can  only  be 
capricious. 

Some  people  want  whatever  they  see. 
Children  are  constantly  longing  for  whatever 
they  have  not,  but  see  pictures  of,  or  find 
that  other  children  have.  And  many 
grown-up  people  are  like  children  in  this.  If 
they  have  money  they  spend  it  without  look- 
ing forward  and  asking  whether  there  is 
not  some  better  use  to  make  of  it  or  some 
greater  need  to  be  met.     But  having  money 


60  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


is  no  reason  for  throwing  it  away.  It  is 
ours  to  be  used  sacredly  as  a  trust.  And 
worse  than  all  this  waste  of  what  we  have, 
is  the  folly  of  some  who  spend  what  they 
have  not,  incurring  obligations  which  they 
cannot  discharge.  The  honest  man  cannot 
understand  how  the  dishonest  or  reckless  man 
can  do  this,  or  how  doing  it,  he  can  hold  up 
his  head  among  his  fellows.  The  duty  of 
wise  spending  requires  us  to  live  within 
what  money  we  have,  and  not  to  spend  what 
we  do  not  have. 

We  shall  only  use  money  wisely  when  we 
can  do  so  habitually,  when  the  right  use  of 
each  dollar  and  of  each  cent  of  each  dollar 
is  a  law  of  our  nature. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  61 


THE  HABIT  OF  HOPEFULNESS 

TO  be  a  dreamer  and  a  visionary  is  to 
lay  one's  self  open,  in  this  practical 
day,  to  some  scorn  and  reproach. 
"Oh,  come  now,  be  practical,"  is  the  way  we 
are  met  if  we  wander  away  from  things  as 
they  are,  or  seem  to  expect  more  from  men 
than  ordinary  give-and-take  conduct.  The 
reformer  in  politics  is  laughed  at  and  told 
that  men  are  what  they  are  and  that  they 
must  be  dealt  with  as  we  find  them;  that 
they  are  not  open  to  high  patriotic  consider- 
ations, but  must  be  moved  by  motives  potent 
on  their  level ;  that  the  dream  of  a  purified 
state  in  which  men  shall  act  disinterestedly 
for  the  good  of  the  nation  is  a  mere  imprac- 
tical dream.  The  purist  in  business  seems  to 
masses  of  men  to  be  the  same  sort  of  vision- 
ary. "You  cannot  be  a  Christian  in  business," 
some  man  says,  "and  succeed.  If  you  want 
to  succeed  you  must  act,  not  on  the  Golden 
Rule  of  the  gospel,  but  on  David  Harum's 
version  of  it,  'Do  to  the  other  fellow  what 
he  intends  to  do  to  you  and  do  it  first.'  " 
Altruism,  consideration  for  others  who  do 
not  take  care  of  themselves  and  hold  their 


62  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


own,  has  no  place  in  the  business  world,  these 
men  argue.  The  man  who  believes  in  an 
order  of  love,  of  thinking  first  of  his  broth- 
er's interests  and  only  afterwards  of  his 
own,  such  a  man  may  be  good  material  for 
citizenship  in  heaven,  but  he  is  not  adapted 
to  membership  in  the  industrial  society  of 
this  age.  And  the  world  smiles  in  the  same 
way  at  the  idealist  in  the  Church,  the  man 
who  believes  in  the  unity  of  the  Church  and 
who  longs  to  see  that  unity  realized  visibly, 
who  wants  to  see  Christ's  followers  follow 
Christ,  who  does  not  see  why  the  command 
of  Christ  which  he  said  was  fundamental, 
the  command  to  love  one's  brother  better 
than  one's  self,  cannot  be  fulfilled,  inside  the 
Church,  at  least.  All  these  are  victims,  the 
world  thinks,  victims  of  a  groundless  hope. 
The  world  looks  at  them  as  Joseph's  broth- 
ers looked  at  him.  "Go  to,"  it  says,  "let  us 
hear  what  this  dreamer  says,"  Only  it  has 
not  as  much  time  as  Joseph's  brothers  had 
and  it  soon  loses  patience  and  leaves  the 
dreamers  to  compare  their  dreams,  while 
it  goes  on  its  practical  way. 

Nevertheless  the  dreamers  have  caught  the 
true  Christian  secret  of  hope.  On  the  day 
of  Pentecost,  Peter  pointed  out  that  what  had 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  63 


happened  that  clay  carried  its  own  evidence 
with  it,  for  it  had  been  foretold  by  the 
prophets  that  when  the  Spirit  of  God  should 
come,  the  old  men  should  dream  dreams  and 
the  young  men  should  see  visions.  The  peo- 
ple of  the  true  light  would  be  visionaries  and 
dreamers.  The  old  Hebrew  ideal  had  been 
the  ideal  of  the  seer,  the  man  who  could 
look  on  to  the  greater  things.  The  supreme 
habit  which  the  nation  acquired  during  the 
centuries  of  its  education  was  the  habit  of 
hope,  of  expectation  of  the  Messiah  and  of 
golden  age.  When  the  Messiah  came,  the 
Jews  failed  to  recognize  him  and  soon  lost 
this  hope  which  passed  on  to  the  Christians. 
The  Christians  now  became  the  people  of  the 
dream,  the  men  and  women  who  saw  the 
higher  and  the  better  things  and  believed 
they  could  exist  here  and  now.  Christianity 
proved  itself  to  be  of  God  by  the  brave  way 
in  which  it  closed  its  eyes  to  what  prevented 
the  coming  of  the  best  things  in  individual 
hearts  and  in  the  world  by  its  blindness  to 
the  despair  of  the  world  and  by  its  confident 
assertion  that  there  was  an  order  of  God, 
that  men  could  and  must  find  it  and  that  the 
kingdom  of  God  must  be  on  the  earth.  It 
would  not  be  discouraged  or  defeated.     God 


64  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


lives,  it  said,  and  the  world  is  his  and  he  must 
have  it  and  rule  it,  and  even  that  which 
troubles  men  and  seems  to  them  unintelligible 
has  some  meaning  which  will  some  day  ap- 
pear. Through  it  good  is  to  be  wrought  out 
and  hope  fulfilled. 

Without  hope  scarcely  anything  that  we 
possess  that  is  really  worth  while  would  have 
come  to  us.  All  that  is  in  fact,  was  first  in 
some  one's  hope  before  it  ever  came  to  be 
in  fact.  The  world  itself  existed  in  the 
hope  of  God  before  it  came  really  to  be. 
"By  faith,"  says  the  writer  of  the  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews,  "we  understand  that  the 
worlds  have  been  framed  by  the  word  of 
God,  so  that  what  is  seen  hath  not  been  made 
out  of  things  which  appear."  In  science  the 
habit  of  hopefulness  is  absolutely  indis- 
pensable. The  man  of  science  with  a  great 
problem,  if  he  assumed  that  the  problem  could 
not  be  solved  and  refused  to  try  any  appar- 
ently hopeful  solution  of  it,  would  never 
make  any  progress.  All  progress  is  made  in 
science  through  the  use  of  the  "working 
hypothesis,"  and  the  "working  hypothesis" 
is  only  the  hope  of  a  solution  to  be  found 
along  a  certain  line.  If  that  hope  is  disap- 
pointed the  real  investigator  tries  another  and 


A     C  II  K  1  S  1  1  A  i\  •  b     H  A  B  I  T  S  65 


another  and  another.  He  will  never  give  up 
hope.  It  is  the  necessary  habit  of  his  mind. 
It  is  so  also  in  art  and  architecture  and 
poetry.  What  is  wrought  out  by  the  artist, 
the  architect,  the  poet,  is  what  he  first  hoped 
and  dreamed,  what  he  saw  in  the  far-off 
reachings  of  his  mind.  In  exploration  it  is 
hope  alone  that  sustains  men,  the  hope  of 
the  new  land  to  be  discovered,  a  new  moun- 
tain or  lake  to  be  found  or  a  river  source  at 
last  to  be  traced  up.  Without  an  irrepres- 
sible hope  in  the  soul  there  could  have  been 
no  Livingstone,  no  Whitman,  no  Columbus. 

How  in  God's  name  did  Columbus  get  over 

Is  a  pure  wonder  to  me,  I  protest, 
Cabot,  and  Raleigh  too,  that  well-read  rover, 
Frobisher,  Dampier,  Drake,  and  the  rest. 

Bad  enough  all  the  same. 

For  them  that  after  came, 

But,  in  great  heaven's  name, 

How  he  should  ever  think 

That  on  the  other  brink 
Of  this  wild  waste,  terra  firma  should  be. 
Is  a  pure  wonder,  I  must  saj-,  to  me. 

How  a  man  ever  should  hope  to  get  thither, 

E'en  if  he  knew  that  there  was  another  side ; 
But  to  suppose  he  should  come  anj^  whither. 
Sailing  straight  on  into  chaos  untried, 
In  spite  of  the  motion 
Across  the  whole  ocean. 


66  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


To  stick  to  the  notion 

That  in  some  nook  or  bend 

Of  a  sea  without  end 
He  should  find  North  and  South  America, 
Was  a  pure  madness,  indeed  I  must  say,  to  me. 

What  if  wise  men  had,  as   far  back  as   Ptolemy, 
Judged  that  the  earth  like  an  orange  was  round. 
None  of  them  ever  said,  '"Come  along,  follow  me. 
Sail  to  the  west,  and  the  east  will  be  found." 

Many  a  day  before 

Ever  they'd  come  ashore. 

From  the  "San  Salvador," 

Sadder  and  wiser  men 

They'd  have  turned  back  again ; 
And  that  he  did  not,  but  did  cross  the  sea, 
Is  a  pure  wonder,  I  must  say,  to  me. 

Even  when  things  seem  to  happen,  they 
happen  to  the  seekers,  the  seers,  the  men 
of  hope. 

All  social,  intellectual  and  moral  progress 
results  from  the  hope  of  better  things  than 
the  things  that  are.  A  vision  is  a  rent  in 
the  sky,  a  breach  in  the  wall,  a  gateway 
through  which  the  larger  things  pour  in. 
The  dreamer  is  he  w^hom  Von  Sturmer  de- 
scribes in  his  lines  in  Richard  Jeffries'  "Story 
of  My  Heart"  : 

Dim  woodlands  made  him  wiser  far 

Than   those   who  thresh   their  barren  thought 
With  flails  of  knowledge  dearly  bought. 

Till  all  his  soul  shone  like  a  star 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  67 


That  flames  at  fringe  of  heaven's  bar, 
Where  breaks  the  surge  of  space  unseen 
Against  Hope's  veil  that  hangs  between 

Love's  future  and  the  woes  that  are. 


There  are  men  who  reahze  that  nothing  that 
is  can  be  accepted  as  the  final  tiling  until  at 
last  the  perfect  is  come,  the  longed-for  and 
hoped-for  best  thing   of   God. 

The  strength  of  life  is  to  be  found  in  the 
depth  and  height  of  our  hopes.  Garibaldi 
and  Mazzini  dreamed  of  an  Italy  united  and 
free  and  were  strong  to  lead  and  achieve 
because  the  hope  they  cherished  held  them 
so  firmly.  And  Horace  Bushnell  was  so  great 
a  preacher  because  the  habit  of  a  mighty  hope 
in  the  gospel  enthralled  his  soul.  He  saw 
great  things  in  God,  and  what  he  saw  in  God 
he  strove  to  bring  out  in  speech  for  men. 
All  great  preachers  must  be  men  of  hope. 
The  world  cannot  be  won  to  despair.  It  is 
true  that  great  multitudes  of  men  hold  to 
hopeless  religions  like  Buddhism,  but  they 
cannot  hold  to  them  contentedly.  The  out- 
reaching  of  the  soul  for  larger  and  better 
things  cannot  easily  be  suppressed.  Men  are 
waiting  for  a  hopeful  word,  and  the  religion 
and  the  preachers  who  can  speak  it  to  them 
control  the  future.     All  ereat  leaders  of  men 


68  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


must  have  somewhere  to  lead  men.  Their 
goal  must  be  a  hope,  and  the  courage  and 
patience  of  all  struggle  will  depend  on  the 
faith  and  strength  of  our  forward  dream.  A 
man  without  resources  of  his  own  takes  up 
a  tunnel  scheme  which  has  failed  and  by  the 
indomitable  perseverance  of  his  hope  enlists 
other  men  and  means,  and  the  enterprise 
which  connects  two  great  states  by  a  tunnel 
under  a  great  river  is  at  once  called  after 
his  name  by  the  public  which  benefits  by 
the  victory  of  his  hopefulness.  The  assur- 
ance that  he  would  find  that  which  he  sought 
carried  Livingstone  through  hardship  enough 
to  destroy  any  ordinary  man  of  hopeless 
heart.  Paul  dreamed  of  a  universal  Church, 
and  his  hope  accomplished  itself  over  every 
obstacle  of  race  and  language.  The  hope 
that  the  Campbells  would  come,  and  a  half- 
demented  girl's  conviction  that  they  were 
coming  and  that  she  heard  their  pipers,  up- 
held the  men  at  Lucknow,  whom  nothing  but 
hope  could  save,  until  Havelock  came.  Our 
own  teachers  would  have  given  us  up  long 
ago  if  it  were  not  for  their  hope  that  in  spite 
of  ourselves  we  could  become  something. 

The  best  things  of  our  lives  are  not  our 
possessions,  but  our  hopes.     We  can  be  bet- 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  69 


ter  men  and  women  than  we  arc.  The 
divinest  reahties  are  the  purposes  of  God 
for  us  which  are  not  yet  fulfilled,  which  are 
among  our  distant  hopes.  And  in  these 
hopes  the  comfort  of  life  is  to  be  found,  the 
things  which  we  have  not  attained  as  yet 
and  cannot  understand,  but  to  which  w^e  hope 
to  come.    Our  hymns  and  poems  tell  us  this : 

Far,  far  away,  like  bells  at  evening  pealing, 
The  voice  of  Jesus  sounds  o'er  land  and  sea ; 

And  laden  souls,  by  thousands  meekly  stealing. 
Kind  Shepherd,  turn  their  weary  steps  to  thee. 

So  Faber  puts  it  and  so  does  Newman : 

So  long  thy  power  hath  blest  me,  sure   it   still 

Will  lead  me  on 
O'er  moor  and  fen,  o'er  crag  and  torrent,  till 

The  night  is  gone ; 
And  with  the  morn  those  angel  faces  smile. 
Which  I  have  loved  long  since  and  lost  awhile. 

And  so  R  W.  H.  Myers,  in  "St.  Paul"  : 

What  can  we  do  o'er  whom  the  unbeholden 
Hangs  in  a  night  with  which  we  cannot  cope? 
What  but  look  sunward  and  with  faces  golden 
Speak  to  each  other  softly  of  a  hope. 

No  habit,  after  the  habit  of  truth,  is  more 
necessary  to  man  than  the  habit  of  hope. 
Whether  or  not  we  can  acquire  that  habit  will 
determine  for  us  whether  we  shall  be  strong 
and  glad,  and  leaders  of  men  to  better  things. 


70  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


THE  HABIT  OF  DOING  THINGS 
NOW 

IN  his  book  entitled  "The  Happy  Life," 
ex-President  Eliot  of  Harvard  quotes 
the  question  of  Emerson,  asking  what 
use  immortality  would  be  to  a  man  who  does 
not  know  how  to  live  half  an  hour.  Im- 
mortality, in  the  popular  view,  is  just  an 
^endless  number  of  half  hours  tied  together, 
one  after  the  other.  What  would  a  man 
do  with  a  million  of  them  who  did  not  know 
what  to  do  with  one?  And  of  what  use  to 
anyone  will  be  a  great,  long-dreamed-of  op- 
portunity for  heroism  or  service,  unless  prep- 
aration has  been  made  for  it  by  such  heroism 
and  service  in  the  things  that  went  before? 
All  these  questions  only  bring  out  clearly  the 
true  principle  of  life;  namely,  that  living 
now  is  the  only  living,  that  we  ought  to  use 
rightly  each  moment  and  fill  it  full  of  true 
work  and  duty-doing. 

This  is  the  only  sensible  and  workable 
principle.  Any  other  is  impossible.  You 
cannot  speak  two  words  at  the  same  time  and 
you  cannot  do  two  acts,  each  requiring  the 
whole  personality,  at  once.     There  is  no  way 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  71 


in  which  we  can  pull  back  into  the  present 
an  hour  that  is  past,  to  do  its  work  over 
again,  and  there  is  no  way  in  which  we  can 
draw  down  into  the  present  an  hour  out  of 
the  future,  in  order  to  live  it  now.  Living 
now  is  the  only  living.  Thinking  of  past 
life  or  of  life  to  come  is  not  living.  The 
chance  to  live  goes  by  while  we  are  thinking 
about  it.  We  cannot  break  off  an  immense 
achievement  and  do  it  at  any  one  given  time. 
We  can  only  live  one  moment  at  a  time  and 
do  at  one  time  the  work  that  can  be  put  in 
one  moment.  Life  ceases  to  be  such  a  com- 
plicated and  impracticable  thing  when  we 
realize  this  and  are  willing  to  live  moment 
by  moment. 

It  is  vitally  important  that  we  should 
realize  that  the  law  of  life  is  living  now.  The 
kind  of  life  we  are  living  is  producing  the 
sort  we  shall  live  forever.  We  may  well 
believe  that  death  brings  a  mighty  change, 
but  it  is  a  change  of  sphere  and  of  condition, 
not  of  character.  We  shall  be  what  we  are. 
The  kind  of  things  we  do  now  and  the  way 
we  do  them  now  will  not  suddenly  undergo 
a  change.  We  shall  keep  right  on.  The 
boy  or  girl  who  is  now  negligent  and  shift- 
less and  untruthful  is  likely  to  go  on  living 


72  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


SO  in  the  future.  If  any  boy  or  girl  is  prompt, 
alert,  faithful  now,  the  habit  of  using  life 
for  living,  of  doing  things  in  the  only  time 
we  ever  have  to  do  them  in,  namely,  now, 
will  get  so  established  that  the  boy  or  girl 
will  go  right  on,  really  living  always. 

And  this  plan  is  the  restful  one.  It  saves 
us  from  the  dread,  the  paralyzing  intimida- 
tion and  surrender  of  the  soul  on  account  of 
life's  bigness.  We  realize  that  we  do  not 
have  to  live  our  years  all  at  once,  that  all  that 
we  have  to  do  is  the  one  thing  that  we  can 
do,  merely  live  our  lives  a  bit  at  a  time.  And 
so  we  save  ourselves  also  from  the  miseries 
of  memory  and  the  terrors  of  our  imagination 
of  the  future  by  the  simple  plea  of  being 
absorbed  in  present  duty.  Nine  tenths  of 
the  wretchedness  of  our  lives  does  not  spring 
from  the  present.  It  springs  from  brooding 
over  the  past  and  the  things  in  the  past 
which  are  beyond  recall,  or  it  comes  from 
apprehensions  of  the  future,  most  of  which 
never  arrive.  In  other  words,  we  lose  our 
lives  in  thinking  of  how  we  did  live  or  failed 
to  live  in  the  past,  or  how  we  will  live  in  the 
future.  But  this  is  missing  the  chance  to 
live,  and  so  we  die  under  the  thoughts  of 
life.     This  is  why  life  grows  so  uneasy  and 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  73 


fretful.     Let  ns  stop  all  this  and  spend  each 
moment  in  really  living. 

By  doing  this  we  accjuire  power  for  future 
living.  Lamentation  about  the  quality  of 
our  past  living  or  great  purposes  about  future 
living  will  only  weaken  us  unless  they  are 
expressed  in  a  better  and  firmer  quality  of 
present  living.  And  if  we  get  into  the  habit 
of  living  strongly  now  we  shall  live  that 
way  hereafter  without  thinking  about  it.  If 
we  do  the  things  that  ought  to  be  done  now, 
we  shall  do  them  then.  The  great  authori- 
ties in  any  department  are  the  men  who  grew 
into  authority  gradually.  They  did  .  what 
each  moment  brought  to  them,  and  so,  after 
a  while,  no  moment  brought  to  them  any- 
thing which  they  could  not  do.  The  world 
soon  found  that  out,  and  straightway  began 
to  bring  everything  in  their  line  to  them. 
"We  become  authorities  and  experts  in  the 
practical  and  scientific  spheres,"  writes  one 
who  was  himself  an  authority,  an  expert,  "by 
so  many  separate  acts  and  hours  of  work. 
Let  no  youth  have  any  anxiety  about  the  up- 
shot of  his  education,  whatever  the  line  of 
it  may  be.  If  he  keeps  faithfully  busy  each 
hour  of  the  working  day,  he  may  safely  leave 
the  final  result  to  itself.     He  can  with  per- 


74  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


feet  certainty  count  on  waking  up  some  fine 
morning  to  find  himself  one  of  the  competent 
ones  of  his  generation  in  whatever  pursuit 
he  may  have  singled  out.  Silently,  among 
the  details  of  his  business,  the  power  of  judg- 
ing in  all  that  class  of  matter  will  have  built 
itself  up  within  him  as  a  possession  that  will 
never  pass  away." 

In  this  way  also  life  achieves  results. 
National  greatness  is  a  product  of  slow  edu- 
cation, not  of  great  efforts.  Germany  and 
the  United  States  and  Japan  have  forged 
ahead  of  other  nations  as  they  have,  not  be- 
cause of  national  energy  or  of  any  sudden 
effort,  but  as  the  result  of  a  careful  and 
thorough  public-school  system  which  has 
trained  the  people.  No  emergency  effort  on 
the  part  of  other  nations  can  offset  this  ad- 
vantage. They  will  have  to  begin  now  where 
we  began  years  ago  and  do  some  living  in 
the  present,  instead  of  spending  time  dream- 
ing of  the  past  or  the  future.  And  with  in- 
dividuals as  with  nations,  results  are  sums 
in  arithmetic.  The  big,  personal  tasks, 
whether  in  character  or  in  work,  are  not 
done  wholesale,  but  are  built  up  piece  by 
piece,  just  as  the  little  coral  insects  build  the 
reefs  or  the  ants  their  huge  mounds.     "Do 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


things  now,"  is  the  way  to  get  many  and 
great  things  done. 

But  while  this  principle  is  the  key  to  the 
achievement  of  great  resuhs,  it  is  not  the 
greatness  of  the  results  which  is  of  signifi- 
cance, but  the  spirit  and  purpose  and  the  pro- 
cess which  produced  them.  A  political  writer 
has  recently  compared  Gladstone,  Bismarck 
and  Cavour  to  the  disadvantage  of  Gladstone 
on  the  ground  that  he  erected  no  new  state 
as  each  of  the  others  did.  But  the  results  of  a 
man's  work  are  dependent  upon  the  circum- 
stances and  materials  in  the  midst  of  which 
his  life  fell.  Not  what  it  added  up  to,  but 
how  he  lived  it,  how  faithfully,  persistently, 
unselfishly,  is  the  great  question  regarding 
each  life.  What  was  the  quality  and  intent- 
ness  of  his  living? 

In  practicing  this  principle  of  "Do  it  now," 
which  was  Dr.  Babcock's  motto,  the  rule  of 
"Living  now  the  only  living,"  there  are  two 
things  that  will  help.  One  is,  of  two  duties 
always  do  the  harder  one  first.  Do  not  sub- 
stitute an  easier  thing  for  a  hard  one.  And 
the  other  is,  check  all  unreal  daydreams. 
Don't  live  in  the  past.  Don't  live  in  the 
future.  Thinking  backward  and  forward  is 
necessarv,  but  now  is  the  living  time,  and 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


we  have  memory  and  imagination  that  by 
them  we  may  learn  the  lessons  of  the  past 
and  draw  upon  the  inspiration  of  the  future 
for  the  needs  of  present  living. 

This  was  the  method  of  Jesus.  His  life 
seems  at  times  almost  to  have  had  no  plan. 
He  stopped  to  spend  hours  with  any  inquir- 
ing heart.  He  was  impatient  at  no  inter- 
ruption. He  seized  each  moment's  oppor- 
tunity for  living  purposes.  He  put  out  his 
life  incessantly.  He  actually  lived.  And 
God  unrolled  the  wonderful  drama  of  his 
life.  He  did,  moment  by  moment,  his 
Father's  will.  "While  it  is  day,"  was  his 
motto.  Therefore  he  was  at  rest.  "The 
Father  .  .  .  hath  not  left  me  alone ;  for 
T  do  always  the  things  that  are  pleasing  to 
him."     This  should  be  our  law  and  our  life. 

Are  you  in  earnest? 

Seize  this  very  minute. 
What  you  can  do 

Or  think  vou  can,  begin  it. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  77 


THE  HABIT  OF  HIGH-MINDEDNESS 

EACH  mind  has  an  altitude  of  its  own. 
Some  move  on  low  levels.  The 
thoughts  which  come  to  them  are  low 
thoughts,  sometimes  evil,  sometimes  vain, 
sometimes  merely  trifling.  Such  minds  seek 
what  they  like.  Serious  conversation  and 
books  are  unattractive  to  them.  They  go 
where  they  can  find  what  is  not  to  their  dis- 
like, where  stories  are  told  and  language 
spoken  which  involve  no  tax  upon  thought 
and  which  feed  the  tastes  of  a  low-leveled 
life.  As  between  the  library  and  the  grill 
room,  the  solid  book  and  the  empty  story, 
the  talk  of  men  about  real  questions  and  life 
and  the  chaff  and  gossip  of  the  scandal- 
spreader  and  fool-jester,  they  choose  the 
lower  down.  There  are  many  other  levels 
below  and  above  this.  The  highest  is  the 
level  of  the  men  who  try  to  bring  all  their 
thoughts  and  tastes  into  conformity  with  the 
best,  who  by  always  choosing  the  upper  and 
better  have  sought  to  acquire  the  habit  of 
a  high  mind,  to  which  evil  thoughts  do  not 
naturally  come  and  by  which  they  are  re- 
jected when  they  do  come.     Such  men  hope 


78  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


some  day  to  come  to  the  height  of  character 
set  forth  in  Daniel's  "Epistle  to  the  Countess 
of  Cumberland" : 

He  that  of  such  a  height  has  built  his  mind, 
And  reared  the  dwelling  of  his  thoughts  so  strong, 
As  neither  fear  nor  hope  can  shake  the  frame 
Of  his  resolved  powers;  nor  all  the  wind 
Of  vanity  or  malice  pierce  to  wrong 
His  settled  peace,  or  to  disturb  the  same : 
What  a  fair  seat  hath  he,  from  whence  he  may 
The  boundless  wastes  and   wealds   of  man  survey ! 

And  with  how  free  an  eye  doth  he  look  down 

Upon  these  lower  regions  of  turmoil ! 

Where  all  the  streams  of  passion  mainly  beat 

On  flesh  and  blood ;   where  honor,  power,   renown, 

Are  only  gay  afflictions,  golden  toil ; 

Where  greatness  stands  upon  as  feeble  feet. 

As  frailty  doth ;  and  only  great  doth  seem 

To  little  minds,  who  do  it  so  esteem. 

How  may  we  hope  to  attain  to  such  high- 
mindedness  that  our  thoughts  will  be  always 
elevated  and  worthy,  firm  and  consecutive, 
that  our  minds  may  be  busy  in  good  things 
and  ready  always  for  hard  tasks  ? 

Substantial  reading  will  help  us  toward 
high-mindedness.  It  will  give  us  a  body  of 
good  thoughts.  The  mind  will  inevitably 
be  employed  upon  something.  If  it  is  not 
employed  upon  what  is  good  and  high,   it 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  79 


will  resort  to  what  is  evil  and  low.  The 
radical  weakness  of  human  nature  appears  in 
the  tendency  of  our  minds  and  hearts  to 
drop.  There  is  a  law  of  moral  gravity  as 
well  as  a  law  of  physical  gravity.  Unless 
the  mind  is  borne  up,  given  good  nourish- 
ment from  without,  it  will  drop  into  empty 
imaginings,  or  evil  will  slip  in  to  fill  the 
place  which  belongs  to  good.  Occasionally 
"a  full  man,"  such  as  Lord  Bacon  had  in 
mind,  may  be  made  by  meditation,  but  as 
a  rule  he  is  made  only,  as  Bacon  said,  by 
reading.  To  be  high-minded  we  shall  have 
to  read  substantial  books.  It  is  all  right  to 
read  books  of  different  kinds.  The  mind 
needs  them.  Dr.  Thomas  Arnold  was  very 
positive  about  this.  "Keep  your  view  of 
men  and  things  attentive,"  he  urged,  "and 
depend  upon  it  that  a  mixed  knowledge  is 
not  a  superficial  one.  As  far  as  it  goes  the 
views  that  it  gives  are  true,  but  he  who  reads 
deeply  in  one  class  of  writers  only,  gets  views 
which  are  almost  sure  to  be  perverted,  and 
which  are  not  only  narrow  but  false.  Ad- 
just your  proposed  amount  of  reading  to 
your  time  and  inclination — this  is  perfectly 
free  to  every  man ;  but  whether  that  amount 
be  laree  or  small,  let  it  be  varied  in  its  kind 


80  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


and  widely  varied.  If  I  have  a  confident 
opinion  on  any  one  point  connected  with  the 
improvement  of  the  human  mind  it  is  on 
this."  When  people  read  at  all  nowadays, 
however,  this  is  not  usually  the  warning  they 
need.  Their  difficulty  is  their  diffuse  read- 
ing. What  we  need  is  more  concentration 
on  a  few  great  books  which  we  shall  master 
and  store  in  the  mind.  This  will  elevate  its 
level. 

A  wise  use  of  conversation  uplifts  the 
mind.  Perhaps  sometimes  we  feel  that  we 
have  nothing  to  give.  Often  the  atmosphere 
of  a  conversation  seems  to  congeal  our 
minds.  We  feel  a  self-consciousness  and  un- 
naturalness  which  strikes  us  dumb.  At  such 
times  we  can  at  least  draw  out  others.  To 
appreciate  their  point  of  view,  to  draw  out 
what  cargo  their  minds  carry,  will  quicken 
and  exalt  our  own  minds.  Even  where  other 
people  have  no  reasoned  opinion  to  share 
with  us  they  have  had  their  histories,  their 
experiences  of  life.  They  came  from  a  definite 
childhood  environment.  All  that  we  can 
draw  out  of  them  will  enrich  them  in  the 
giving  and  will  help  to  ennoble  the  tone 
of  our  own  minds  if  we  view  it  with 
sympathy. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  81 


Each  day  has  its  opportunities  for  the  en- 
richment of  memory.  "I  know  over  a  hun- 
dred poems  and  Psahiis  now,"  said  an  old 
man  of  humble  circumstances  but  of  a  high 
mind.  "I  memorize  them  on  the  cars  and 
whenever  I  can,  and  they  make  me  ver}* 
rich."  A  low  mind  cannot  long  remain  low 
when  filled  with  the  great  words  which  can- 
not be  kept  down,  which  soar  aloft  toward 
God.  Each  of  these  words  displaces  some 
other.  The  mind  has  elastic  capacities,  but 
its  working  sections  are  limited  and  they 
can  be  preempted  or  reclaimed  by  what  is 
great  and  good. 

The  high-minded  man  will  use  rightly  and 
yet  with  strong  control  the  floods  of  news- 
paper and  magazine  literature  of  the  day. 
Chinese  Gordon  at  one  time  stopped  his 
newspapers  altogether,  and  many  people 
would  be  better  off  without  them.  They  fill 
the  mind  with  low  and  trivial  interests  and 
they  degrade  its  tone.  The  highest  type  of 
mind  cannot  be  produced  from  a  diet  of 
periodical  literature.  It  can  use  the  papers 
that  pass  in  the  night,  but  its  light  will  be 
thrown  on  them,  not  drawn  from  them. 

Loving  true  judgments  and  sound  knowl- 
eds:e  for  their  own  sake  and  not  for  the  sake 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


of  the  commercial  uses  to  which  they  can 
be  put,  exalts  the  mind.  The  mind  that 
dwells  with  the  truth  and  that  ever  travels 
with  it  will  always  have  truth  to  give,  but 
the  gift  will  be  the  richer  because  free  and 
not  calculated,  because  it  flows  from  a  foun- 
tain stored  up  for  its  own  sake.  The  love 
of  truth  gives  the  mind  its  fullest  elevation 
and  freedom. 

The  mind  is  helped  to  a  higher  level  by 
an  attitude  of  appreciation  and  good  will. 
If  we  are  ever  looking  for  what  we  dislike 
and  disapprove  we  shall  soon  feel  the  down- 
pull  of  such  an  attitude  upon  the  tone  of  the 
mind.  That  which  we  despise  the  mind 
should  reject,  but  its  lookout  should  always 
be  for  the  things  to  which  it  can  assent.  In 
every  conversation  it  will  give  most  and 
gain  most  by  picking  out  what  it  can  ap- 
prove. If  we  watch  ourselves  we  shall  soon 
discover  how  practical  and  searching  this 
principle  is.  The  mind  soon  takes  a  hint, 
and  when  it  learns  that  it  is  to  see  what  is 
fair  and  to  be  blind  to  all  else,  it  will  re- 
spond to  the  appeal  of  higher  things  which 
this  law  addresses  to  it  and  will  uplift  itself. 

We  must  check  also  in  the  interest  of  the 
highest-mindedness     all     useless     and     evil 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  83 


vagaries  of  the  imagination.  The  im- 
agination is  a  great  wanderer.  It  lox-es  to 
stray  everywhere.  There  is  no  nook  or 
cranny  of  the  universe  where  it  does  not  go, 
and  many  of  its  journeys  are  wasteful  or 
worse.  It  goes  down  into  low  places  and 
drags  the  mind  with  it.  The  high  mind  must 
lay  a  law  upon  the  imagination  and  keep  it 
on  the  heights. 

The  highest  things  in  the  world  are  prin- 
ciples. Whoever  associates  with  principles 
is  in  the  loftiest  company.  The  mind  which 
wants  to  be  higher  should  be  directed  toward 
principles.  Each  new  principle  which  it 
finds  and  fixes  is  a  new  anchorage  to  the 
highest.  When  we  have  defined  to  ourselves 
duty  and  truth  and  purity  and  unselfishness, 
w^e  have  bound  our  minds  to  the  noblest  we 
can  know.  They  will  be  high  minds  as  long 
as  they  do  not  forget. 

And  no  principles  wnll  more  elevate  the 
mind  than  the  principle  of  prayer  and  the 
principle  of  Christ.  Prayer  checks  all  down- 
ward movement  of  the  mind  and  spreads  out 
over  its  every  part  the  upward  pulling  of  the 
Spirit  of  God.  And  Christ  is  the  great  prin- 
ciple of  exaltation.  He  is  more  than  that ; 
he  is  the  Person  who  lifts.     'T,  if  I  be  lifted 


84  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


up  from  the  earth,"  he  said,  "will  draw  all 
men  unto  myself."  And  to  be  a  Christian 
is  to  have  the  lower  levels  shut  to  us  while 
the  mind  seeks  the  things  that  are  above, 
where  Christ  is.  He  has  now  been  lifted 
up  and  the  mind  of  the  Christian  must  be 
with  him,  on  the  high  levels  of  God. 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  85 


THE  HABIT  OF  HIGH-MINDED 
LOWLINESS 

HIGH-MINDEDNESS  never  shows  it- 
self more  unmistakably  than  in  the 
humility  of  true  unselfishness.  The 
noblest  illustration  of  this  is  found  in  the 
incident  of  the  Saviour's  washing  the  dis- 
ciples' feet  on  the  evening  of  the  night  of  his 
betrayal.  "Jesus,  knowing  that  the  Father 
had  given  all  things  into  his  hands,"  says 
John,  "and  that  he  came  forth  from  God,  and 
goeth  unto  God,  riseth  from  supper,  and 
layeth  aside  his  garments ;  and  he  took  a 
towel,  and  girded  himself.  Then  he  poureth 
water  into  a  basin,  and  began  to  wash  the 
disciples'  feet,  and  to  wipe  them  with  the 
towel  wherewith  he  was  girded."  As  a 
simple  statement  of  fact  this  is  beautiful  and 
wonderful,  but  it  is  more  than  a  statement 
of  fact.  It  is  a  spiritual  interpretation. 
Jesus  rose  and  stooped.  That  is  the  fact. 
But  he  rose  and  stooped  "knowing  that  he 
came  forth  from  God,  and  goeth  unto  God." 
That  is  the  deep  spiritual  interpretation. 

We   see   here  first  of  all  the  relation   of 
belief  to  conduct,  of  thought  to  action.     His 


86  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


deed  sprang  from  his  mindedness.  His  deed 
was  lowly  because  his  mindedness  was  high. 
What  we  hold  theoretically  is  bound  to  de- 
termine what  we  do  practically.  It  is  so  in 
the  sciences  and  arts.  The  results  flow  from 
theory,  and  the  theory  determines  the  results. 
At  a  Yale  alumni  dinner  some  years  ago, 
Mr.  Julian  Kennedy,  a  famous  oarsman  in 
his  day  and  now  one  of  the  leading  blast- 
furnace engineers,  took  issue  with  the 
modern  demand  for  practical  technical  train- 
ing as  against  the  old-fashioned  theoretical 
type.  He  defended  the  Sheffield  Scientific 
School  for  preserving  old-time  traditions  in- 
stead of  making  its  courses  manual,  work- 
shop courses.  "It  is  the  man  who  knows 
the  theory  who  does  the  thing,"  said  he.  *Tt 
is  the  true  theory  that  counts.  The  man  who 
designed  the  guns  used  on  the  American 
ships  in  the  Spanish  War  never  had  any  ex- 
perience with  a  hammer  and  bench,  and  he 
did  not  see  the  guns  cast.  It  was  all  purely 
theoretical.  But  when  the  guns  went  off 
the  results  were  not  theoretical."  And  so 
in  all  great  modern  buildings.  The  en- 
gineers sit  in  their  offices  and  figure  and  draw 
on  paper.  In  mills  which  they  do  not  visit, 
the  girders   are   made.     On  ground   which 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  87 


they  have  never  seen  the  material  is  as- 
sembled and  the  bridge  or  the  sky-scraper  is 
reared,  each  piece  fitting  each  other  piece, 
and  the  whole  great  structure  falling  prac- 
tically together  from  mere  thecM-etical  draw- 
ings. The  result  flows  from  the  mindedness 
of  the  engineer.  And  wdiat  is  true  in  these 
arts  is  true  also  in  the  art  of  life.  -  There 
as  truly  as  in  the  physical  sciences  results  de- 
pend upon  our  theories,  what  we  do  upon 
what  w-e  think.  Professor  James  begins  his 
lectures  on  "Pragmatism"  with  a  quotation 
from  Mr.  Chesterton's  "Heretics,"  in  which 
he  sets  forth  his  conviction :  "There  are 
some  people,"  says  Mr.  Chesterton,  "and  I 
am  one  of  them,  who  think  that  the  most 
practical  and  important  thing  about  a  man 
is  still  his  view  of  the  universe.  We  think 
that  for  a  landlady  considering  a  lodger  it 
is  important  to  know  his  income  but  still 
more  important  to  know  his  philosophy.  .  .  . 
We  think  the  question  is  not  whether  the 
theory  of  the  cosmos  affects  matters,  but 
wdiether  in  the  long  run  anything  else  affects 
them."  And  Professor  James  adds :  "I 
think  with  Mr.  Chesterton  in  this  matter.  I 
know  that  you  ladies  and  gentlemen  have  a 
philosophy,  each  and   all  of  you,  and  that 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


the  most  interesting  and  important  thing 
about  you  is  the  way  in  which  it  determines 
the  perspective  in  your  several  worlds." 

What  kind  of  mind  we  have  will  determine 
what  kind  of  deeds  we  do,  and  it  is  primarily 
upon  these  questions  on  which  Jesus  had  a 
certain  mind  that  all  depends.  He  knew  his 
origin  and  his  destiny.  In  a  note  in  one 
of  his  books,  Ruskin  says  there  are  three 
great  questions  which  confront  every  soul : 
"Where  did  I  come  from?  What  can  I 
know?  Where  am  I  going?"  What  we  do 
depends  on  what  our  mind  is  with  regard  to 
these.  We  shall  serve  men  in  the  spirit  of 
God  if  we  have  a  mind  high  enough  to  realize 
its    heavenly    origin   and    heavenly    destiny. 

We  see  also  in  this  incident  in  Jesus'  life 
power  conscious  of  itself  but  used  in  serv- 
ice. That  is  the  end  of  power.  The  supreme 
virtue  of  machinery  is  docility.  The  history 
of  civilization  is  only  the  story  of  the  taming 
of  force,  the  bending  of  the  power  of  nature 
to  obedience.  Just  so  Jesus  regarded  living 
power.  It  was  a  thing  to  be  used.  "There- 
fore doth  the  Father  love  me,  because  I  lay 
down  my  life,"  he  said.  "I  have  power  to 
lay  it  down,  and  I  have  power  to  take  it 
again."     It  was  this  possession  of  limitless 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  89 


power  all  subjugated  to  unselfishness  which 
made  Jesus  so  calm  and  steadfast.  He  had 
the  habit  of  lofty-minded  self-forgetfulness. 
Such  self-forgetfulness  and  unselfishness 
are  a  sign  of  confidence  in  one's  own  posi- 
tion, an  evidence  of  easy  noble-mindedness. 
It  is  the  noble  who  dare  be  lowly.  Jesus  with 
his  full  knowledge  of  his  origin  and  destiny 
in  God  would  stoop  to  any  lowliness.  He 
was  high-minded  enough  to  dare.  It  is  told 
by  one  of  the  childhood  friends  of  the  late 
Walter  Lowrie,  who  was  drowned  at  New- 
port in  1 90 1,  just  at  the  threshold  of  his 
career,  that  "one  summer  several  young  peo- 
ple, some  guests  of  the  family,  and  the 
Lowrie  boys  were  waiting  outside  the  Tyrone 
station  for  a  train.  A  wretched-looking  wo- 
man with  a  little  baby  in  her  arms,  carrying 
a  traveling  bag,  came  past,  with  another  lit- 
tle child  hardly  able  to  walk  clinging  to  her 
skirts  and  following  as  best  it  could.  One 
of  the  boys,  half  in  earnest,  probably,  yet 
thinking  it  was  hke  Walter,  said,  'There's 
your  chance,'  and  without  hesitation  Walter 
spoke  to  the  woman,  picked  up  the  child  and 
carried  it  over  to  the  branch  train  and  onto  a 
car.  It  was  always  rather  crowded  round 
the  station  in  the  afternoon,  and  Walter  came 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


back  looking-  a  little  foolish,  not  because  he 
minded  being  seen  by  so  many,  but  rather, 
T  think,  because  we  could  not  help  showing 
that  we  thought  it  fine  of  him,  and  he  had 
a  horror  of  showing  off."  He  was  sure 
enough  of  his  social  position  to  dare  to  stoop. 
A  high  mind  bred  a  lowly  love. 

And  is  there  not  a  self-revelation  in 
haughtiness  and  pride?  Where  there  is  no 
lowly  love  we  know  there  is  no  true  high- 
mindedness.  The  people  who  are  priggish 
and  snobbish,  who  act  discourteously,  betray 
an  origin  and  a  destiny  very  different  from 
the  Saviour's,  who  rose  and  stooped. 

And  deeds  not  only  reveal  our  minds, 
haughty  deeds  low  minds  and  lowly  deeds 
lofty  minds,  but  deeds  also  help  to  make 
minds.  Humble  and  loving  acts  will  help  to 
make  us  high-minded. 

Wouldst   thou   the   holy   hill    ascend 

And  see  the  Father's  face. 
To  all  his  children  humbly  bend 

And  seek  the  lowest  place. 
Thus  humbly  doing  on  the  earth 

What  things  the  lofty  scorn 
Thou  shalt  assert  the  noble  birth 

Of  all  the  lowly  born. 

On  the  other  hand,  unlowly  conduct  is  a 
source  of  deterioration  of  mind  and  charac- 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  91 


ter.  That  was  why  the  best  sentiment  of 
the  South  disapproved  of  slavery.  It  might 
or  might  not  be  bad  for  the  slave.  It  was 
unmistakably  bad  for  the  slaveholder.  No 
man  was  fit  to  own  another  man.  The  sense 
of  ownership  of  a  man  could  not  be  good 
for  the  man  who  owned  him.  And  so  haz- 
ing, often  good  for  the  hazed,  is  invariably 
bad  for  the  hazer.  All  use  of  power  that 
is  not  humble  and  unselfish  is  bad  for  high- 
mindedness.  The  possession  of  it  is  pre- 
sumption not  for  its  wnllful  exercise,  but  for 
its  restraint.     We  have  it  only  as  a  trust. 

Naught  that  I  have  nn-  own  I  call, 

I  hold  it  for  the  Giver. 
My  heart,  my  life,  my  strength,  my  all, 

Are  his  and  his  forever. 

He  who  feels  this  and  acts  upon  it  is  the 
truly  high-minded  man. 


92  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


THE  HABIT   OF  NOT   DAWDLING 

THE  habit  of  not  dawdling  is  one  of  the 
most  needed  and  most  useful  Chris- 
tian  habits.     A  dawdler  can't  really 
make  a  good  Christian.     If  he  does,  he  in- 
variably ceases  to  be  a  dawdler. 

Plenty  of  boys  and  girls  who  are  now 
dawdlers  have  in  them  the  making  of  good 
Christians,  and  one  of  the  first  signs  of  their 
real  purpose  to  be  Christians  will  be  the  lay- 
ing aside  of  all  dawdling.  Some  boys  take 
twice  as  long  to  run  an  errand  as  it  ought 
to  take  and  waste  a  great  deal  of  time  mak- 
ing up  their  minds  to  run  it.  Some  girls 
are  so  slow  in  dressing  that  their  mothers 
have  to  do  a  great  many  things  which  their 
daughters  could  have  done  for  them  if  they 
had  only  been  prompt  and  quick.  A  great 
deal  of  time  and  patience  is  wasted  by 
dawdlers. 

And  as  a  rule  the  dawdlers  are  the  very 
people  who  complain  most  when  other  peo- 
ple dawdle  and  inconvenience  them.  If  the 
postman  loiters  along  the  way  and  delivers 
the  mail  late,  if  the  train  is  slow  and  does 
not  arrive  on  time,  if  the  coachman  who  was 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  93 


to  meet  the  train  lounges  about  his  work  and 
is  not  there,  no  one  is  more  impatient  than 
the  very  people  who  always  dawdle  them- 
selves and  who  are  now  vexed  at  nothing 
l)ut  the  very  principle  on  which  they  them- 
selves act,  the  principle  of  dallying  with  one's 
work  instead  of  doing  it. 

There  is  a  good  word  for  all  dawdlers 
in  the  Second  Book  of  Samuel.  It  was  after 
the  long  war  between  the  house  of  Saul  and 
the  house  of  David.  At  last  Abner  re- 
volted from  the  house  of  Saul  and  sent  word 
to  the  elders  of  Israel,  saying,  "In  times  past 
ye  sought  for  David  to  be  king  over  you : 
now  then  do  it."  That  was  the  manly  way 
to  talk.  "Now  then  do  it."  Duties  are 
not  to  be  talked  about,  they  are  to  be  done. 
In  our  work  and  our  warfare  with  evil  and 
in  our  home  duties  and  our  achievement  of 
character,  the  word  for  us  is  Abner's  word, 
"Do  it." 

It  is  fooJish  to  dawdle  because  of  fear 
that  we  cannot  do.  The  only  way  that 
we  can  find  out  whether  we  can  or  not  is 
to  try  at  once  and  to  try  hard.  And  all  that 
we  ought  we  can.  There  is  no  such  thing 
as  impossibility  in  the  line  of  our  divinely 
assigned  work.     General  Armstrong  used  to 


94  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


scorn  the  idea  of  impossibility.  At  an  In- 
dian Rights  conference  at  Lake  Mohonk  he 
once'  leaped  up,  when  some  one  had  pro- 
nounced a  certain  righteous  course  of  action 
as  impossible,  with  the  words :  "Impossible ! 
What  are  Christians  in  the  world  for  but 
to  achieve  the  impossible  by  the  help  of 
God?"  As  he  went  about  in  behalf  of 
Hampton  Institute  he  was  constantly  com- 
pelled to  do  what  could  not  be  done.  "Once," 
he  said,  "there  was  a  woodchuck  and  a  dog  ||  I 
got  after  him.  Now  woodchucks  can't  climb 
trees,  but  this  one  had  to,  so  up  he  went." 
And  another  time,  when  he  simply  had  to 
get  money  for  the  school,  he  told  of  an  old 
negro  who  was  seen  digging  in  a  tree  for 
a  'possum.  Some  one  told  him  there  was 
no  'possum  there.  "Ain't  no  'possum  in  dat 
hole?"  said  the  old  man.  "Dey's  just  got 
to  be,  'cause  dey's  nuffin'  in  de  house  for 
supper." 

Men  always  can.  "I  can  do  all  things  in 
him  that  strengtheneth  me,"  declared  Paul. 
There  were,  of  course,  things  which  he  did 
not  do.  There  are  things  which  we  cannot 
do.  But  the  only  way  to  find  out  is  to  try, 
and  if  we  try  we  shall  find  that  we  can  do 
everything  that  we  ought  to  do.     There  is 


1 

I 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  95 


no  excuse  for  dawdling  because  we  can't 
perform. 

The  best  cure  is  to  begin  at  once.  In  the 
matter  of  character-building,  where  daw- 
dling is  most  deadly  and  most  easy,  we  can 
begin  now  by  cutting  off  some  indulgence, 
or  by  taking  on  some  new  practice,  such  as 
prayer  at  a  fixed  hour  or  a  new  attitude  in 
prayer  which  will  break  up  dawdling  habits. 
Or  we  can  deal  with  our  speech,  and  by 
making  it  clear  and  right  and  instant,  help 
to  confirm  the  habit  of  straightforwardness. 

But  the  difficulty  with  most  dawdlers  is 
not  the  difficulty  of  beginning,  but  the  diffi- 
culty of  keeping  at  it.  They  are  like  the  son 
in  the  parable  who  said  promptly,  'T  go, 
sir,"  and  went  not.  They  are  ready  to  make 
a  start,  but  they  soon  stop  to  rest  or  to  think 
of  something  else  or  to  look  out  of  the  win- 
dow or  to  wish  that  the  task  were  done. 
They  are  like  the  Bandar-log,  the  Monkey 
People  who  are  always  dreaming  and  wish- 
ing that  things  could  be  done  just  by  wish- 
ing that  they  w'ere  done,  who  never  stick  at 
anything  long  enough  to  complete  it,  but 
always  are  carried  off  by  some  new  scheme. 

There  is  a  character  in  the  "Jungle  Book" 
who  was  no  dawdler.     That  was  Rikki-tikki- 


96  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


tavi.  When  he  saw  something-  to  be  done 
he  did  it,  and  when  he  took  hold  he  did  not 
let  go.  Woe  to  Rikki-tikki  if  in  his  fight 
with  Nag  he  had  released  his  hold  on  the 
big  cobra's  head,  and  woe  to  the  family  in 
the  bungalow  if  he  had  dawdled  in  taking 
hold. 

In  our  struggle  for  character  we  must  not 
be  frightened  into  letting  go.  We  shall 
certainly  be  lifted  up  higher  before  we  get 
through  than  we  had  ever  dared  to  hope  to 
go,  but  we  are  not  to  fear.  The  Saviour 
of  whom  we  have  taken  hold  has  taken  hold 
of  us  with  his  divine  grasp  and  he  means  to 
raise  us  far  above  all  that  is  low  in  life  and 
at  last  to  lift  us  sheer  into  his  home  above. 
We  ought  not  to  be  fearful. 

Jesus  when  he  was  here  was  looking  for 
men  who  would  not  dawdle.  His  own  life 
was  full  of  eager,  unhesitating  action,  and 
he  called  men  to  come  to  him  in  the  same 
spirit,  and  straightway  they  rose  up  and  left 
all  and  followed  him.  That  was  the  kind  of 
disciple  he  desired.  And  he  taught  these 
men  how  to  act  as  the  workmen  of  God. 
prompt,  eager,  ready  for  opportunity,  quick 
to  do  every  duty. 

In  life  and  work  we  are  not  to  be  as  those 


,_> 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  97 


who  are  asleep,  who  begin,  perhaps  wake- 
fully,  but  soon  dawdle  off  again.  We  are 
to  watch  and  work  as  the  children  of  the 
day.     Our  Captain's  appeal  to  us  is  the  old 

hymn  : 

Awake,   my  soul,   stretch   every   nerve, 

And  press  with  vigor  on  ; 
A   heavenly   race   demands   thy   zeal, 

And  an  immortal  crown. 

A  cloud  of  witnesses  around 

Hold  thee  in  full  survey : 
Forget  the  steps  already  trod, 

And  onward  urge  thy  way. 

'Tis  God's  all-animating  voice 
t  r  That  calls  thee  from  on  high  ; 

1 1  'Tis  his  own  hand  presents  the  prize 

I  *  To  thine  aspiring  eye : 

That  prize  with  peerless  glories  bright, 

Which   shall  new  luster  boast, 
When  victors'  wreaths  and  monarchs'  gems 

Shall  blend  in  common  dust. 

Blest  Saviour,  introduced  by  thee. 

Have  I  my  race  begun  ; 
And,  crowned  with  glory,  at  thy  feet 

I'll  lay  my  honors  down. 


I. 


98  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


THE  HABIT  OF  DECISION 


T 


HE  word  decision  occurs  in  only   one 
^        place  in  the  Bible.    That  is  in  the  third 
t    \  chapter  of  Joel.     "Multitudes,  multi- 

tudes in  the  valley  of  decision !    for  the  day 
of  Jehovah  is  near  in  the  valley  of  decision." 
This  was  the  valley  where  issues  were  set- 
'   '  tied  and  judgment   was  to  be  passed.     To 

;    ',  that  momentous  time  Jehovah  was  bringing 

■  1  the  nations.     In  that  valley  is  where  all  men 
'  j  ever  are. 

■  :  And  so,  though  the  word  occurs  only  here, 
i  in  the  prophecy  of  Joel,  the  idea  of  the  sig- 
nificance of  our  choices,  and  the  importance 
and  supremacy  of  the  act  and  character  of 
decision,  is  everywhere  in  the  Bible.  God 
is  shown  to  us  as  the  great  chooser,  the  One 
who  deals  with  men  and  nations  with  posi- 
tive and  firm  decision.  He  is  spoken  of  thus 
twenty-eight  times  in  Deuteronomy  alone. 
And  the  true  man  is  set  forth  as  the  chooser. 
"I  have  chosen  the  way  of  faithfulness,"  he 

!•  says.     "Thine  ordinances  have  I  set  before 

me.  I  cleave  unto  thy  testimonies :  .  .  .  Let 
thy  hand  be  ready  to  help  me ;  for  I  have 
chosen  thy  precepts."     This  was  the  glory 


y 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  99 


of  Daniel  and  his  friends.  When  they  joined 
the  young  men  in  the  king's  court,  they  de- 
cided that  they  would  not  defile  themselves, 
and  when,  later,  they  were  put  to  the  test 
of  fidelity  to  their  God,  they  met  the  test 
with  unflinching  decision.  To  the  threat  of 
the  fiery  furnace  they  solemnly  replied  :  "Our 
God  whom  we  ser^•e  is  ahle  to  deliver  us  from 
the  burning  fiery  furnace;  and  he  will  de- 
j     j^  liver  us  out  of  thy  hand,  O  king.      But  if 

^  »  not,  be  it  known  unto  thee,  O  king,  that  we 

will  not  serve  thy  gods,  nor  worship  the 
golden  image  which  thou  hast  set  up."  De- 
cision was  the  redeeming  quality  in  the  un- 
just steward.  And  it  was  the  splendid  thing 
in  Paul.  He  was  always  straightforward, 
clear-cut,  decisive.  It  was  not  his  habit  to 
temporize  and  dawdle.  It  was  his  habit  at 
once  to  seek  the  will  of  God  and  to  do  it. 
The  habit  of  decision  is  still  the  g-reat  and 
commanding  virtue.  The  undecided  man, 
the  wabbler,  is  to  us  the  most  pathetic  and 
helpless  of  men.  In  "David  Harum"  there 
was  a  man  who  was  always  distressed  when 
he  had  to  make  up  his  mind.  He  could  not 
decide  what  shoes  to  put  on  in  the  morning, 
and  he  would  get  a  black  shoe  on  one  foot 
and  a  tan  shoe  on  the  other  foot,  and  then 


100  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


sit  in  misery,  unable  to  decide  which  one  to 
change.  The  New  Testament  is  strong  in 
its  condemnation  of  the  irresokite  man.  "Be 
no  longer  children,"  it  says,  "tossed  to  and 
fro- and  carried  about  with  every  wind  of  doc- 
trine, by  the  sleight  of  men,  in  craftiness, 
after  the  wiles  of  error."  "He  that  doubt- 
eth,"  adds  James,  "is  like  the  surge  of  the 
sea  driven  by  the  wind  and  tossed.  For  let 
not  that  man  think  that  he  shall  receive  any- 
thing of  the  Lord;  a  doubleminded  man, 
unstable  in  all  his  ways."  How  different  and 
how  much  nobler  is  the  man  who  can  act, 
who  is  ever  ready  for  instant  and  unhesi- 
tating action.  "I  hate  this  dreadful  titter- 
fritteration  of  time ;  I  can't  stand  it  any 
longer,"  said  Samuel  C.  Armstrong  during 
the  war.  He  was  used  to  decision,  to  doing 
things. 

Few  books  have  exerted  more  influence 
than  John  Foster's  essay  on  "Decision  of 
Character."  That  is  our  great  need — such 
a  habit  of  decision  that  we  shall  not  waste 
time  and  strength  in  thinking  about  future 
decisions,  or  in  devising  reasons  for  not  mak- 
ing present  decisions,  but  shall  do  at  once, 
without  delay,  what  we  see  to  be  duty. 
When  our   fathers  or  employers   say,   "My 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  101 


boy,  will  you  please  do  this,"  we  will  say, 
whatever  we  are  doing  at  the  time,  not  "Ex- 
cuse me  for  a  moment,  please,"  not  "I  cannot 
just  now,"  but  "Yes,  sir,"  and  do  it  with- 
out loitering.  And  we  need  the  habit  of 
decision  not  only  as  to  acts,  but  also  as  to 
character,  so  that  we  shall  be  firm  and  posi- 
tive and  straight-acting.  Some  people  are 
this  way.  They  know  how  to  make  up  their 
minds  and  to  do  directly  what  they  have 
minded  to  do.  And  others  are  wabblers  and 
hesitators. 

Perhaps  we  say :  "Yes,  we  are  among 
the  weak.  How  can  we  acquire  the  habit 
of  decision?" 

A  house  needs  a  foundation.  So  does 
a  character.  Or  rather  the  house  is  the 
foundation  plus  the  structure  built  upon  it. 
The  character  runs  down,  too,  to  include 
the  foundation.  If  we  want  characters  of 
decision  we  should  lay  the  physical  basis 
for  them  in  clean,  active,  swift-answering 
bodies.  We  can  give  ourselves  a  good, 
wholesome  discipline  to  this  end  by  taking 
our  bodies  in  hand.  With  many  great  men 
early  poverty  and  necessity  did  this  service 
for  them,  and  frugality  and  hard  work  gave 
them   tough,   w^ell-knit,   well-purged   bodies. 


102  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


But  deliberate  choice  can  take  the  place  of 
necessity.  Paul  tells  us  he  took  his  body,  in 
hand  and  disciplined  it.  "I  buffet  my  body," 
he  says,  "and  bring  it  into  bondage."  A 
governed  will  is  not  likely  to  live  in  an  un- 
governed  body.  An  alert,  determined, 
quick-working  will  is  more  at  home  in  a  body 
held  in  subjection  and  taught  obedience. 

We  can  help  ourselves  to  become  resolute 
and  decided  by  doing  conclusive  thinking  on 
our  problems.  \\'e  need  to  make  up  our 
minds  on  fundamental  things  and  to  keep 
them  made  up.  There  are  many  questions 
about  which  we  do  not  need  to  bother  our- 
selves, and  which  should  not  bother  us. 
These  we  can  postpone.  But  there  are  others 
which  lie  at  the  very  root  of  things.  The 
questions  of  the  supremacy  of  truth,  of  our 
duty  to  God  and  man.  of  the  divinity  of 
Christ,  are  central  questions.  We  should 
think  of  them  until  we  are  clear  about  them. 
and  we  should  build  solidly  upon  our  con- 
victions of  truth  and  act  fearlessly  in  accord 
with  them.  If  we  have  no  convictions 
we  shall  have  little  character.  Decision  in 
conviction  will  produce  decision  in  char- 
acter. 

If  we  fix  our  attention  rigidly  on  virtue, 


f 


^ 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  103 


on  truth,  on  things  that  are  good,  we  shall 
find  that  such  thinking  hreeds  decisiveness 
of  action  and  character.  Our  wills  are  given 
to  us  for  the  purpose  of  directing  our 
thoughts.  "The  point  to  which  the  will  is 
applied  is  always  an  idea,"  says  one  of  our 
leading  psychologists.  "The  only  resistance 
which  our  will  can  possibly  experience  is  the 
resistance  which  such  an  idea  offers  to  being 
attended  to  at  all,"  If,  accordingly,  we  will 
think  of  good  things  and  of  doing  good 
things,  and  will,  as  we  can,  refuse  to 
let  our  attention  turn  to  bad  things  or  to 
not  doing  good  things,  the  rest  will  take 
care  of  itself,  or,  rather,  God  who  is 
working  in  us  will  take  care  of  it.  Paul 
knew  this  when,  in  the  counsel  he  gave  the 
Philippians,  he  bade  them  simply  to  take  care 
of  their  thoughts.  "Whatsoever  things,"  he 
said,  "are  true,  whatsoever  things  are  honor- 
able, whatsoever  things  are  just,  whatsoever 
things  are  pure,  whatsoever  things  are  lovely, 
whatsoever  things  are  of  good  report ;  if 
there  be  any  virtue,  and  if  there  be  any  praise, 
think  on  these  things."  If  they  thought  thus 
first,  then  they  would  do  what  he  bade,  and 
the  God  of  peace  and  strength  would  be 
with  them — the  God  of  decision. 


104  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


Also  we  can  help  ourselves  by  practice. 
We  can  set  ourselves  by  practice  to  make 
decision  a  habit  of  our  life.  Professor  James 
has  told  us  how  to  acquire  the  good  habits 
we  desire.  These  are  some  of  his  sugges- 
tions :  ( I  )  Make  automatic  and  habitual,  as 
early  as  possible,  as  many  helpful  actions  as 
we  can.  Get  into  the  way  of  settling  things 
decisively.  (2)  We  must  launch  ourselves 
with  as  strong  and  decided  an  initiative -as 
possible.  The  new  Christian  must  openly 
and  bravely  confess  Christ.  This  will  make 
him  surer  in  his  discipleship,  and  it  will  make 
him  a  firmer  and  more  dauntless  character. 
(3)  Never  suffer  an  exception  to  occur  until 
the  new  habit  is  securely  rooted  in  your 
life.  Following  this  rule  with  any  good  habit 
we  wish  to  acquire  will  breed  decision.  (4) 
Seize  the  first  possible  opportunity  to  act  on 
every  resolution  you  make  and  every  prompt- 
ing you  may  experience  in  the  direction  of 
the  habits  you  aspire  to  gain.  (5)  Keep  the 
faculty  of  effort  alive  in  you  by  a  little  gratu- 
itous exercise  every  day.  "The  man  who 
has  daily  inured  himself  to  habits  of  con- 
secrated attention,  energetic  volition  and  self- 
denial  in  unnecessary  things,  will  stand  like 
a  tower  when  everything  rocks  around  him 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  105 


and  when  his  softer  fellow-mortals  are  win- 
nowed like  chaff  in  the  blast." 

Unselfishness  is  a  great  help  to  decisive- 
ness of  character.  It  is  easier  to  think 
quickly  for  others  than  it  is  for  ourselves,  and 
if  we  will  set  out  to  do  things  for  other  peo- 
ple we  will  find  that  we  can  be  decided  for 
them  wliere  we  were  irresolute  for  ourselves. 
And  unselfishness  is  itself  an  essential  part 
of  decision.  Decision  of  character  involves 
readiness  to  do  for  the  right  and  to  die  for 
the  right.  It  is  that  that  marks  us  as  men 
and  that  shows  that  we  have  achieved  the 
manly  character.  General  Armstrong's  negro 
troops  sang  this  in  "The  Enlisted  Soldier"  : 

We  want  no  cowards  in  our  band 

That  will  their  colors  fly, 
We  call  for  valiant-hearted  men 

Who're  not  afraid  to  die. 
They   look   like   men.      They   look   like   men. 

They  look  like  men  of  war. 
All  armed  and  dressed  in  uniform 

They  look  like  men  of  war. 

Are  we  such  men  or  do  we  only  look  like 
them  ? 

And  lastly,  the  unflinching  Christ,  who 
never  hesitated,  but  met  all,  can  take  us  and 
make    us    his.       His    living    Spirit,    which 


106  .  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


wrought  in  Simon  Peter,  who  denied  him  at 
the  taunt  of  a  girl,  but  a  few  days  later  faced 
the  multitude  in  his  name,  and  died  at  last 
in  his  service,  can  work  also  in  us  the  same 
mighty  change  from  weakness  to  decision. 
Shall  he  not  be  given  freedom  to  do  it  ? 


> 


s 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  10^ 


THE  HABIT  OF  FINDING  THE 
WILL  OF  GOD 

THE  most  important  thing  in  life  to  look 
for  is  the  will  of  God.  Nothing  can 
be  of  more  significance  to  each  of 
us  than  his  own  right  life  work,  which  that 
will  assigns.  "For  what  doth  it  profit  a 
man,"  asked  Jesus,  "to  gain  the  whole  world, 
and  forfeit  his  life?"  Which  we  may  in- 
terpret to  mean,  in  the  language  of  our  own 
condition,  what  shall  it  profit  a  man  to  gain 
the  whole  w^orld  but  to  miss  his  life  work? 
God  has  such  a  work  for  each  one  of  us.  It 
is  made  up  of  all  the  works  he  has  for  us 
to  do  day  by  day.  We  need,  above  all  things, 
the  habit  of  always  finding  this  work. 

The  strength  of  life  consists  in  the  power 
of  the  grip  of  God's  purpose  upon  us.  Has 
it  control  of  us?  The  hold  of  a  man  upon 
truth,  it  has  been  remarked,  is  of  less  con- 
sequence than  the  hold  of  the  truth  upon  the 
man.  How  fast  does  it  hold  him?  How 
completely  does  it  dominate  him  ?  These  are 
the  questions  which  arise  also  regarding  our 
lives  and  the  will  of  God.  Does  it  have  a  grip 
upon  us  ?    How  masterfully  does  it  hold  us  ? 


108  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


It  is  all  right  for  us  to  talk  of  our  purpose 
for  God,  but  the  great  reality  is  God's  pur- 
pose for  us.  When  we  have  been  absorbed 
in  that,  then  at  last  we  know  what  strength 
and  rest  are.  We  lean  then  not  upon  the 
firmness  of  our  resolves,  but  upon  the  mighty 
grasp  of  God  and  his  will  upon  our  lives. 

We  have  no  right  to  fall  into  the  habit  of 
drifting  with  regard  to  the  will  of  God. 
Many  people  move  along,  accepting  all  that 
comes  without  scrutiny,  assuming  that  the 
path  of  least  effort,  least  resolution,  least  re- 
sistance, is  the  will  of  God.  Sometimes  it 
is,  and  sometimes,  oftener,  it  is  not.  We  are 
bound  to  think,  to  open  life  to  all  the  di- 
vine possibilities,  to  consider  anything  that 
may  be  able  to  show  that  it  is  the  will  of 
God  for  us.  "The  family  money  was  in  that 
business,"  said  a  young  man  studying  for 
the  ministry,  of  a  great  business  firm,  "and 
I  might  have  gone  in  there  too.  It  would 
have  meant  a  good  deal  more  in  the  way  of 
return  to  the  family,  but  I  didn't  see  that 
that  was  where  I  wanted  to  put  my  life." 
So  he  chose  what  God  chose  for  him,  entirely 
apart  from  the  natural  and  obvious  thing  for 
him.  If  we  are  going  to  find  the  will  of  God 
we  must  be  willing  to  look  for  it  where  it 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  109 


is,  which  will  often  be  where  we  don't  ex- 
pect to  find  it. 

IVIany  men  have  been  diverted  from  what 
they  at  first  wanted  and  thought  was  God's 
will,  but  found  out  in  time  was  not.  Every 
man  who  is  following  a  selfish  or  evil  course 
will  find  himself  wrenched  away  from  that 
the  moment  he  seeks  the  will  of  God.  But 
even  among  good  men  the  will  of  God  is 
constantly  a  surprise.  David  Livingstone 
desired  ardently  to  go  to  China.  He  had 
been  interested  in  China  through  Gutzlaff. 
But  God's  will  took  him  to  Africa.  Robert 
Morrison  wanted  to  go  to  Africa.  God's 
will  took  him  to  China.  Griffith  John  wanted 
to  go  to  Madagascar.  But  God's  will  led  him 
to  central  China.  Whoever  would  habitu- 
ally follow  the  will  of  God  must  be  pre- 
pared for  surprises — all  of  them  ultimately 
far  better  than  our  original  designs. 

And  now,  assuming  that  we  are  willing 
to  follow  the  will  of  God,  how  may  we  get 
into  the  habit  of  knowing  what  it  is  ? 

( I )  First,  then,  however  great  our  prob- 
lems ahead  may  be,  there  is  always  some 
small  duty  near.  The  first  thing  is  to  do 
that,  to  get  into  the  habit  of  always  doing 
that.     That  will  lead  on  to  the  next  thing. 


110  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


Life  is  a  unity.  It  may  look  like  a  chaos 
and  tangle,  but  it  is  one,  not  a  heap  of  de- 
tached items.  It  is  rather  like  a  long  twine. 
What  we  need  to  do  is  to  take  hold  where 
we  can  and  work  straight  along.  So  in  find- 
ing duty  we  need  to  accept  the  present  task. 
To  shirk  our  present  assignment  blinds  us 
for  seeing  future  assignment.  The  accept- 
ance of  present  duty  teaches  us  the  habit  of 
doing  all  duty,  of  ever  knowing  God's  will. 

(2)  Think  carefully  of  the  reasons  for  and 
against  the  various  possible  courses  of  action, 
and  balance  them  as  well  as  you  can.  In 
his  reminiscences,  John  D.  Rockefeller  tells 
how,  in  the  early  years  of  the  Standard 
Oil  Company,  he  and  his  associates  were 
always  ready  to  consider  and  to  discuss  any 
proposal  whatever.  They  were  looking  for 
the  best  methods,  and  never  took  it  for 
granted  that  there  were  no  better  ones  than 
those  they  were  following.  If  men  act  in 
this  way  in  business,  much  more  in  the  su- 
preme thing  of  all  ought  we  to  be  open- 
minded  and  thoughtful. 

(3)  Seek  unselfish,  disinterested  and  high- 
minded  counsel.  ]\Iany  people  ask  advice  of 
those  who  will  not  counsel  them  impartially, 
but    whose   judgment    is   biased   by    desire. 


1 


u 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  111 

And  even  when  they  ask  disinterested  coun- 
sel, it  is  not  always  high-minded.  People 
who  do  not  themselves  live  in  the  will  of 
God,  and  who  have  no  habit  of  regarding  it, 
are  poor  people  to  consult. 

(4)  Above  all  others  whom  we  consult, 
we  should  advise  with  God  through  prayer. 
His  counsel  is  worth  more  than  that  of 
anyone  else,  and  he  is  ready  to  give  it.  Be- 
cause of  our  own  ignorance,  our  helpless- 
ness and  impatience,  because  of  the  spiritual 
hindrances  without  and  within  with  which 
only  prayer  can  cope,  because  God  knows 
what  we  cannot  know  and  makes  his  knowl- 
edge available  for  our  guidance,  we  ought 
to  seek  the  habit  of  discernment  of  duty 
through  prayer. 
\\  (5)    We  should  put  off  all  unnecessary  de- 

j  (  cisions  as  to  details.  Such  details  usually 
take  care  of  themselves  in  any  case.  But  we 
should  settle,  as  soon  as  possible,  the  great 
questions  of  principle.     God's  custom  is  to 

/   I  show  not  the  end  of  the  way,  but  the  way. 

What  will  come  later  on  in  the  way  we 
must  not  ask.  We  must  settle  now  the  di- 
rection of  the  way.     The  earlier  we  decide 

;     5  the  better,  for  the  sake  of  our  character,  for         ■    \^ 

!  the  sake  of  our  preparation  for  the  future, 


112  A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


for  the  sake  of  our  influence  now.  We  have 
no  such  assurance  of  the  future  as  will  war- 
rant us  in  putting  off  the  acceptance  of  God's 
true  will  for  our  lives. 

(6)  Let  us  keep  ever  before  us  the  Scrip- 
ture principles  of  duty-knowing  and  duty- 
doing  :  "Seek  ye  first  his  kingdom,  and  his 
righteousness";  "Lay  not  up  for  yourselves 
treasures  upon  the  earth,  where  moth  and 
rust  consume,  and  where  thieves  break 
through  and  steal" ;  "We  look  not  at  the 
things  which  are  seen,  but  at  the  things 
which  are  not  seen :  for  the  things  which  are 
seen  are  temporal ;  but  the  things  which  are 
not  seen  are  eternal" ;  "Seek  the  things  that 
are  above,  where  Christ  is."  In  all  things  let 
Jesus  Christ  "have  the  preeminence."  The 
higher  our  hearts  are  lifted  above  the  ma- 
terial and  transient,  the  more  fully  and  joy- 
fully and  naturally  will  they  move  among 
men,  ruling  the  present  world  and  not  being 
ruled  by  it. 

(7)  Let  us  habitually  ask  what  is  morally 
right  and  face  this  question  unflinchingly 
and  under  the  scrutiny  of  Christ.  What  so- 
ciety approves  is  of  no  great  consequence. 
The  important  question  is.  "What  is  in  ac- 
cord with  the  character  of  God?"     Rieht- 


A     CHRISTIAN'S     HABITS  113 


eotisness  is  not  the  consensus  of  opinion.  It 
is  what  Christ  is.  We  shall  always  recognize 
God's  will  if  we  always  see  God  in  Christ 
and  test  all  things  in  that  presence. 

(8)  We  must  not  be  timid  about  taking 
chances.  Faith  is  a  venture.  It  is  a  rea- 
sonable venture — far  more  reasonable  than 
unwillingness  to  take  the  venture — but  still 
it  is  a  venture.  If  we  never  leap  into  the 
dark  we  shall  never  find  eternal  life  or  eternal 
service  here,  or  the  Eternal  City  hereafter. 
The  will  of  God  is  not  a  visible  and  ma- 
terial object.  It  is  a  way  of  the  soul.  Only 
the  soul's  eyes  can  discern  it.  The  habit 
of  seeing  it  is  the  habit  of  seeing  with  the 
inward  vision. 

(9)  We  can  fortify  the  habit  of  doing- 
God's  will  by  ever  choosing  the  personal 
duties.  Jesus  always  did  this.  He  was  al- 
ways accessible  to  souls.  No  enterprise  was 
more  important  to  him  than  the  service  of 
souls,  of  living  persons.  Personal  duty 
should  always  be  given  the  preference  by  us. 
As  over  against  any  general,  indefinite,  in- 
stitutional calls,  there  are  always  the  calls 
of  particular  men,  women  and  children. 
These  are  the  important  things.  If  we  get 
into  the  habit  of  finding  people  who  need 


114  ACHRISTIAN'S     HABITS 


help  and  of  helping  them,  we  shall  be  fol- 
lowing the  religion   of  God,   as  James  de- 
fines it. 
I  I  (lo)   There  are  two  selves  in  each  of  us 

i    \  — a  superior  and  an  inferior.     We  are  never 

I    %    '     in  any  doubt  as  to  which  is  which.     We  may 
be  in  doubt  as  to  some  outer  problem,  but 
;  \  \  we  know  the  better  nature  in  us.    What  does 

'  y  it  require?     The  better  within  us  can  never 

•   '  be  satisfied  save  by  the  will  of  God. 

(  II )  Lastly, almost  everything  will  depend 
on  how  commanding  the  conception  of  duty 
is  with  us.     If  our  habit  is  to  do  duty,  and  in 
'_  our  minds  and  hearts  we  exalt  duty  as  the 

\  loftiest  thing"  in  life,  we  shall  be  able  to  find 

\  what  each  particular  duty  is  much  more  easily 

!  than  if  the  whole  notion  of  duty  is  slovenly 

;-  and  careless.     If  we  regard  the  will  of  God 

I  as  the  one  commanding  thing,  and  habitually 

'I  order  our  lives  by  the  desire  to  do  it,   we 

I  shall  have  no  trouble  in  acquiring  the  habit 

•  of  recognizing  always  what  it  is. 

There  could  be  no  greater  or  finer  habit 
than  this. '  We  have  a  fine  old  hymn  which 
/  \         exalts  it  in  the  one  noble  line : 


/i 


To  do   Thy  will  the  liahit  of   my  heart. 

Is  it  the  habit  of  our  hearts? 


Theological  Semmafy-Speer  Library 


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